


Say Yes, Say Yes

by Schwoozie



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 02, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-25
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 12:24:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 34,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2507735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surely the dead don't walk, in a world like this, where a young blonde girl can stand in her home and sing.</p><p>Daryl and Beth, season two.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Rude," aka the "marry her anyway" song.

He notices her right away. 

Really, how could he not; legs that go on for miles, built with the sturdy slimness and long tapered limbs of a gazelle, silky hair that bounces just so when she runs. It doesn't surprise him to see the whole camp sniffing after her; even Rick, steady Rick, with a troubled wife and growing son, can't help the way his eyes slide over now and then. It's daughters like that that make Daryl understand her father's fear of them. It makes Daryl imagine what his own daughter might be. Not someday, of course—no-day, because if his chances of being a father before were slim they're next to nothing now—no matter how his gruff heart slips a little when Carl asks him how to do things, things even big bad Shane can't do. No, Daryl is never going to be a father—but he understands the preciousness of it, the way Hershel holds his daughter close.

He can't help it, of course, entering her orbit. They all do, one way or another. She bears the same quiet authority as her father, as well as the same distrust. Distrust of him. They all have it. They don't think Daryl sees, but he _sees_ —sees the squinty eye Dale shoots him when he and Andrea stand a little too close together; sees Shane's shoulders tighten into tree trunks when he goes out of his way for Lori. Like he's luring her into something; not because Rick asked it of him, trusted his strength and his integrity to keep her safe; and he thinks of all of them it's only the Grimes' who would be truly surprised, should something happen.

He expects Daryl to go after her. It's something Daryl sees the moment they meet; no more than a cursory glance shared between them as Daryl enters the room, checking the entrances and exits as he's learned to do since childhood, seeking the center of authority and facing it with his strong arm. Even in that brief moment, he feels Hershel's quiet strength; not the kind that rains fists or spews swears, but the sturdy, oaken regard that Daryl is even less inclined to fuck with. And it scares him, in that first moment when he feels Hershel's eyes on him—feels them sweep his body, from his scuffed boots to his hard hands, the long, virile length of him—the way he suddenly feels dangerous. Not in danger, not yet, but _dangerous_ —the way he's felt in supermarkets and movie theaters and anywhere parents hold their children close. He meets Hershel's eyes for a fleeting glance, and he sees the iron gates there, the way they swing shut against the invaders already within; sees the way, without his gaze wavering, he looks towards his girl, at the carefully measured space between Daryl and her. And Daryl knows. He knows to stay the fuck away from this man's daughter.

He thinks about it sometimes, all alone in his far off tent, as close as he can be to leaving the property. Imagines her shoving him against the barn door, sliding her tongue into his mouth like the caresses her hands track down his sides. Imagines fumbling with the latch until they stumble inside, collapse panting and wild in the hay. Imagines sinking into her ready heat, feeling her fingers nearly as work hardened as his scratching at his scalp as he makes her scream. It's nothing more than idle fantasizing, and it doesn't even get his cock halfway to stiff; but it makes it hard to look at Hershel in the morning, because that man knows; he knows what kind of man he is, and he knows what kind of man Daryl is. And if he could see into Daryl's thoughts, tame as they are, there would be nothing there to prove him different.

No, Hershel's right to hold his daughter close, in this big bad world; right to look at Daryl askance when he passes bear-like through the house. Daryl isn't to be trusted around daughters, especially not daughters like her. Flowering female. Farmer's girl. Only recently grown from childhood to a frightening womanhood all her own. It doesn't matter the grief she holds, the terrors she keeps at bay; she's a woman and he's a man and as far as they know they're two of the only humans left on the planet.

Daryl can't help the way he notices Maggie Greene. He barely sees her sister.

He doesn't know how this makes her so much more dangerous.


	2. Anywhere I Lay My Head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been two days on the farm, and Daryl already can't stand it. The girl singing in the kitchen doesn't help much neither.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yes, I'm continuing this little thing. It's going to be a season two fic, if Beth and Daryl had interacted more. In order to help with their arc, events from canon are going to be out of order—Bethyl matters way more than accuracy, anyway.
> 
> I'm having a lot of fun with this, hope you do too :)

They've been here two days and Daryl already hates this fucking farm.

It's clean. It's pleasant. It's quiet. It's picture albums and water from the tap and rising with the crows.

The only thing Daryl's ever risen with is an ache behind his eyes and a crooked neck. The only albums he's ever been in are x-rays of his own broken bones.

He's stayed away from the house whenever possible. Done his duty by Rick, checking up on his son, watching the rise and fall of his slight chest and thinking of the other little ribcage of their group, lost in the woods, waiting on them. Waiting on him.

Somehow he feels he's the one meant to find her. Like it's a search he'd been born for.

Now he isn't looking for anyone as needy as Sophia. Rick’s gone off with Shane to get the lay of the land, wrestle through whatever’s widening the gap between them. Daryl thinks he sees it, sometimes, in the flare of Shane's nostrils when Lori's around. That's who he's looking for. Lori. Upturned nose, stolid chin. A strong woman who knows it.

Rick's gone off with Shane and asked for Daryl to tell her where he'd gone—like she needed reminding that, like time out of turn, her man could not sit with her at the bedside. Daryl doesn't mind the errand. It gives him something to do, scratches his itchy feet that turn towards the woods, the search, waiting for them to fall together and let him start the damn thing.

He wouldn't mind, if not for this fucking house.

He tries not to let the screen door slam; tries to walk with quiet feet even as the ancient floorboards strain beneath his boots. He doesn't look at the pictures on the walls, the scuffed sideboard he would bet Hershel built with his own two hands.

Keeps his eyes front, center. One boot, then another.

He doesn't belong in a home where generations of flowers have died and regrown on the window sills.

Carl he finds sleeping soundly, alone, head tilted back on the pillow and a small line of drool staining his lip. Daryl's mouth quirks at that, imagines teasing him for it if the boy were to wake; but he sleeps, and Daryl tugs the sheet a little higher up his chest before moving on.

He steps into the kitchen and hears singing.

He knows by the back of her head that it's her, the little one. Named something nondescript, he thinks; like Betty, or Charlotte—something small and quiet, like her. He doesn't think he's heard her speak a single word in his presence; didn't even see her face until Otis's funeral, the way she hid behind her daddy. He can't find it in himself to fault her for it, least not with him, Shane. Hardening men in hardened times. She's right to keep away.

He sees right off that Lori isn't here, and runs through the rest of the property in his mind even as he pauses to hear her sing.

_“Well I see that the world is upside down, my pockets were filled up with gold. Now the clouds have covered o'er and the wind is blowing cold. I don't need anybody because I learned to be alone—“_

It's a fine voice, even he knows—high and clean like running water, filling the room from where she stands by the sink, stacking dishes in her hands. Her hips swing a little side to side, a counterpoint to the flick of her ponytail as she tilts her head, hums between the words like she's only half-remembered them. Daryl shifts the crossbow on his shoulder, suddenly feeling awkward for having brought it in the house. He thinks back to the woman who'd lived in the trailer next to them, after Mama died—ugly as a hag and blind as a bat, but after his whippings when he'd lie bloody and sore on the trash heap by the door, he'd hear her voice, clear as bells, singing songs the world had forgotten.

Surely the dead don't walk, he thinks, in a world like this, where a young blonde girl can stand in her home and sing.

_“She's laughin' in her sleeve at me, I can feel it in my bones—“_

He clenches his crossbow tighter as she starts to turn. He knows what it will look like to her, when she sees him—muddy boots, dirty shirt, jeans he hasn’t changed in a week and hair he hasn’t washed in two, standing here staring like there’s something he wants—

And if he hadn't blinked at the exact moment she sees him and the dishes slip from her hands, they might have missed all that came after.

The crash on the tiled floor shoots him clear out of his skin and starts a whirring in his brain—louder and louder until he's spinning with it, spinning, like the swirl of plates his Mama smashed one by one on the clean kitchen floor, Pop's own china that he bought special for some chick that went south, and Merle grasps his hand as the door swings open and he enters in all his fury—

The house rings in silence.

She's standing there, looking at him a little sheepishly, when he explodes.

“Fucking _bitch_!” he shouts, nearly a scream, almost a scream in the way his breakdown in the CDC wasn't, something pitched and jagged as he clenches the hilt of his knife until his knuckles ache. Although he's across the kitchen his step forward pushes her against the sink, and that makes him even angrier. “You tryin'a bring every walker in the world down on us?”

“I didn't—”

“Yeah you _didn't_ , stupid—“

“Daryl!”

And there's miss queen bee herself, Lori Grimes, standing in the door to the kitchen with flaring nostrils and a flush across her cheeks. She's a sight to behold in anger, this one, but Daryl is still pumping with adrenaline that has no outlet and even her cutting glare isn't enough to calm the jackrabbit of his anger.

“Ought'a talk to this girl about safety in the fucking apocalypse, stupid thing can't even hold ont'a stack of plates, fucking useless little—“

“Daryl,” she says again, sharper, chilled, and he sees her hand has settled to the knife on her hip. That gives him pause—it always does, with weapons around—and he suddenly feels the press of his heaving breaths against a too-fast heart, the sweat standing out on his temples, the shameful way his hands shake as they release blade and bow—

And the girl is still there in wariness by the sink, a crease of concern between her eyes.

“Rick’s with Shane,” Daryl blurts. “Wanted you to know.”

Lori’s face tightens. She glances at the girl, then back at him, easing her hand off her knife. “What are they talking about?” she asks, like she’s trying to be casual.

“Dunno,” Daryl says. The girl’s still watching him. He glances at her, and feels some of that anger simmer back up—though whether at himself, or at her, he doesn’t know. “Don’t you sing no more, neither,” he mutters. “Gives me a fucking headache.”

“I’ll try,” she says—not strangled, like he wants, but sweet, soft. Like she intends to.

He looks at them, between their feet—and he leaves. Ignores their stares, ignores their eyes, ignores the shards of shattered plate on the floor—brushes past Lori and through the door, ready, beyond ready, to be clear of this damn, pretty, blue-eyed house.


	3. Second First Impressions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The walkers, the distance—all the things stacked against Daryl in his search for Sophia, a horse seems the best option for conquering them. What he doesn't expect is to run into a certain blonde who doesn't take too kindly to strangers borrowing her horse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second chapter posted in a day, aren't you lucky :)
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

His whole skin's felt itchy since he gave Carol that flower, and even the unfamiliar smell of horse isn't enough to offset it. He doesn't know why he did it, now he thinks on it, though it felt right at the time—something about the thought of his own mama, a hazy memory of bringing her wildflowers and basking in her boozed-out smile. Whatever. It's over with now. She probably tossed it in the trash anyway.

He's still thinking about that little girl, though, lost in the woods. There's something wrong with that thought, a little girl so scared, especially one already so fearful. Daryl'd never interacted with her much—never interacted with most of the women, besides Andrea, and that's cause she never stopped talking—but he'd known since the day he and Merle set foot in that camp what was going on with her daddy. It made him sick, to stand by and do nothing, and he suspects Merle might have even felt the same—but it wouldn't help their plan if they rough up some abusive asshole on their way out of dodge. Wouldn't help a bit. Didn't stop Daryl from spitting on his grave, though, once Carol had turned her dry eyes away.

Now Daryl's sorting through the tack, trying to remember snippets from the summer Merle went with some chick from a horse ranch who set Daryl up with her younger sister. The relationship, if you could call it that, had been a disaster—he took her to a dive bar for their first date, fucked her right after, came too soon and couldn't get her off before she grew bored and reached for a smoke. Pitiful, Merle'd called him, pitiful, and Daryl wouldn't disagree—he hadn't even been all that turned on, just nervous, and something in that energy'd made him blow his load like a freaking fire hose. He did get some riding lessons out of it, though, and he figures anything that will help him cover more ground and keep him safe from walkers is worth the baggage that comes with it.

He's concentrating on untangling some sort of harness, and so it takes him a few moments to distinguish the boot steps from the general sound of the stable. He knows from the tread it isn't a man, and he doesn't think any of women have reason to harm him, so he lets his heart rate build and abate without turning around; just continues working at the tack, biting his lip and waiting for her to speak.

“I hope you aren't thinking of taking Nellie out.”

He's confused when he doesn't recognize the voice, and turns around to find the little blonde girl he'd yelled at in the kitchen, arms crossed over her chest as she glares at him suspiciously. He's a bit taken aback by the strength of her gaze, the way it makes his hackles prickle; he fights the urge to slump his shoulders and squares them instead, slouching as casually as he can against the wall as he turns back to the tack.

“Don't know no fucking Nellie.”

He struggles with the leather for a few more moments before she huffs and suddenly she's there, in his space, tugging the harness out of his hands and untangling it in a few sure motions. He flattens himself against the wall, watching her warily as she offers the piece with a raised eyebrow.

“Nellie,” she says, “is my horse. And you aren't taking her.”

Daryl can't help his snort as he looks her up and down, from her flowery white blouse to her scuffed cowboy boots.

“Who's gonna stop me? You?”

He takes the tack from her and worries his hands over the leather, pretending to be inspecting it when really he's not sure how much longer he can hold her gaze.

“Just cause Daddy doesn't like guns doesn't mean I don't know how to pull a trigger.”

Daryl looks up at her, incredulous. “You'd shoot me over a damn horse?”

“ _My_ horse.” As light smile tugs at her lip. “You already broke _my_ dishes.”

Daryl frowns, looking down again. He'd been trying not to think about the whole episode—had skirted Lori and stayed out of the fucking house, making up excuses in his head in case Rick asked him to check on his kid. He hasn't asked, not the last few days, and Daryl wonders if Lori's said anything; wonders how Lori would look at him now, after that day in the kitchen. She'd never looked on him warmly, but he figures, Rick doesn't mind him, he can kill walkers—she'd tolerated him, rough as he is. He doesn't want to know how she'd look on him now.

This girl would have slipped his thoughts, if not for the time he saw the glint of her hair behind a fluttering upper-story window; if not for the way she looked at him as he screamed abuse, like she was worried for him. Like she thought he needed a hug or something.

She sure isn't looking on him kindly now, although that little smile hasn't left, tilting the heart of her face as she tips her head, studying him.

“I won't take your horse, alright?” he mutters. “Go out on fucking foot, get ripped to bits, but god forbid I take your fucking horse.”

“I'm sure you could handle yourself,” she says. Her hair is pulled into a soft ponytail that's let loose the strands around her ears, fluttering in the still air of the stable.

“Fuck yeah, I can.”

She breathes out a little laugh, like he's said the funniest thing in the goddamn world. He thinks he should be angry, like she's laughing at him, but he just feel uncomfortable. Like his skin is coated in brambles.

“What?” he asks, defensive.

She shrugs. “You swear a lot.”

He blinks. “That surprise you?”

“Don't hear it often.”

He snorts. Daryl suddenly realizes this is the longest conversation he's had with anyone since he lost Merle; and even then, it was usually Merle yammering on with him pretending to listen. He frowns, digging his nails into the tack and looking back towards the house. “What you doing out here anyway? Thought you weren't supposed to leave the house.”

She frowns. “What gave you that idea?”

“Dad like yours.”

“Daddy's protective, but he ain't a tyrant.”

_I wouldn't let you out._

Daryl doesn't know where the thought comes from and it shuts him up quick; the wrongness of it, of equating himself with her daddy. It makes his fingers itch.

She's caught somewhere between a smile and a frown, like she doesn't know what to make of his sudden silence. Daryl feels anxiety rise in his gut, but she's boxed him in and he wouldn't be able to leave without touching her, and after the kitchen he can't imagine she'd like that. So he stands there, shifting the tack in his hands, and somewhere along the way their silence becomes companionable; him looking at his wrists, her eyes on the house. He looks with her, and sees her sister and Glenn standing on the porch, pretending not to look at each other. Daryl snorts.

She looks at him. “What?”

“Your daddy's gonna wish he had a shotgun soon.”

She looks towards the pair for a moment, and smiles, a little sadly. “I think it's nice.”

“What is?”

“They found each other. It took the world to end, but they found each other. It's nice.”

Daryl snorts. “Girl, this ain't some fairytale. Your sister'll chew that poor kid up and spit him out.”

She shrugs, smiling her little smile, a little sadder. It fades slowly as they watch Maggie and Glenn on the porch, as a cloud comes in front of the sun.

Daryl looks at her, then, really looks at her, and when her eyes flutter to his it takes a few breaths before he can look away.

“Y'already got you a prince charming. Don't need no more romance here.”

She frowns. “What are you talking about?”

“Farmer Fred. Tall kid, looks like oatmeal.”

“ _Jimmy_ ,” she says, sounding exasperated for the first time. “His name is Jimmy.”

“Whatever.” Daryl looks at the tack again and huffs out a breath. “I don't got a horse, guess I better be headed out, then. Kid ain't gonna find herself.”

“It's good of you,” she says quietly. “Doing this. I wish I could...” She trails off, and shakes her head, little lips pulling back into her mouth.

Daryl shifts his shoulders, knowing he should say something. Knows Prince Charming would have something to say.

He sticks the tack in her face so abruptly she jumps back a step, looks up at him questioningly. “Here,” he says. “You know where it goes.”

She takes it slowly, with her fingertips, like she doesn't want her hands touching his. “Thanks, Daryl.”

“Mmph.” Daryl picks his bow up from where he'd lain it, spitting in his hand to wipe off some of the sawdust. He looks up and realizes she's still watching him, like she's waiting for something. She holds the tack and he holds the bow and she looks down, hair fluttering.

Daryl grunts again, and walks away, ignoring the way his sleeve catches on the edge of hers, even though it makes his muscles jump; then he's past her and in the open air and he lets out a long, slow breath, chasing the smell of horse from his nostrils.

He doesn’t look back. He suspects she might be watching him, and he doesn't want her to see him looking too.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a reminder that I'm playing with the timeline, so even though Daryl gave Carol the flower, the next chapter will NOT be the events of Cherokee Rose - Daryl agreed not to take the horse, so he won't be getting stabbed by his own arrow any time soon. Not saying it won't happen though :)


	4. What Breaks Your Bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even in this kitchen, in this house, under this pretty girl's gaze, Daryl can't stop rubbing at his bloody knuckles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a reminder that events in this fic are not in the same order as they are in canon.
> 
> I hope you enjoy! :)

Daryl doesn't know why he's come back here, sitting, now, at the kitchen table; knows he's playing with fire, that the moment anyone comes in he'll be trapped, judged for bringing himself back inside this house. He's judging himself; feels sick as he rubs at the dried blood on his knuckles, shifts his cracked-brown boots. He's beat down his fair share of people in his time; most of them even deserved it. He knows this one does. But it doesn't stop the kid's moans from swirling inside his skull, suffocating him like so many ghosts.

He did it for Rick, he knows that; at first it was for Rick. The man's a good leader, but Shane's breakdown—and Daryl knows a breakdown when he sees one; Shane's particular kind is fierce, volatile, something to back away from; and no matter how Daryl might admire Shane's ability to get things done, he isn't about to play hot potato with hand grenades—the tension with Shane is making Rick doubt himself. Make him feel weak. If he needs Daryl to step in and be his strong arm for a while, it's not something Daryl's used to, but it's something he can do. He can be that for Rick, since Merle isn't there to be it for him.

Looking around the bright and yellow kitchen, he thinks about his brother—what he'd be saying, doing, if he were still around. If Rick, the very man Daryl is growing to respect, hadn't left him to die on a rooftop. He knows now that Rick had no other choice at the time, and it shouldn't be a surprise that Merle's downfall was his own big mouth—Daryl just wishes he had done something. Something to stop it, something to save him, something to be something more than the pussy Merle always told him he was.

A pussy sitting in a bright and yellow kitchen, rubbing blood off his knuckles, alone but for the girl padding in with quiet steps.

It's the second time she sneaks up on him, although he's sure she doesn't need to—that she's small and quiet enough and holds this house so deep in her bones the creaks and cracks slip quietly around her feet. All he knows is he looks up and she's there, watching him quietly, mouth quirking when he jumps.

“Hi,” she says.

Daryl grunts, looking back at the table, face and neck burning. He knew it was a bad idea, coming back here. Should have turned right around the moment this damn house came into view.

She's walked to the sink and is washing her hands. He finds, after Randall's comments, after what he said his group had done... he finds he can't stop looking at her. Not cause he wants to do something to her— _jailbait_ , he hears Merle hiss in his ear, _never had nothing but Jesus between those lips and the feller don't got enough dick to teach any girl right_ —but because he realizes there are men that might. That she ain't meat for the select few who go for kids; that in that pretty yellow sundress, bright and buttoned and skimming her thighs, she might as well be a salt lick in a desert. It bothers him, this new awareness of her, and he bites his tongue against a comment about that dress, bright and impractical and likely to flip over her head the moment she tries to run—and they will run, he has no doubt; whether it's the walkers or the men prowling around, slobbering for a piece like her...

She turns around and catches him staring and chuckles a little nervously, flapping her hands like sparrow wings in the air, drying them. “I got something on my face or something?”

“Mmph,” Daryl grunts, looking at the cupboard.

“Want something to eat?”

Daryl shrugs, and she seems to take that for assent. She spends the next few minutes bustling around the kitchen with the surety of one who has done the same time and time before—gathering beans from the pantry and salted meat from the ice box, arranging it on on a plate the color of a robin's egg, placed delicately between Daryl's resting elbows. He glances up at her as she sets down the plate and is shocked to see her face has gone red.

“Y'alright?” he asks before he thinks better of it, shrinking down in his seat as she turns her full attention on him.

“Me? Yeah, I guess,” she says, frowning. “Why do you ask?”

Daryl clears his throat, gestures at his own face. “You're all flushed.”

“Oh,” she says. She presses a palm to her cheek, looks at it like her skin will flash a temperature reading. “Guess I just ain't used to being useful these days.”

Daryl frowns, fingering a bean. It's pale green, almost yellow, and wilts a little as he flops it around the plate. “You do plenty of stuff.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Yeah? You been watching me, Mr. Dixon?”

Daryl feels his own face flush, and he kicks at the chair across from him, wincing a little when it squeaks across the floor. “Just seen you doing stuff,” he mutters.

“That's ok. I don't mind. It's good someone's keeping an eye on things.” She picks at a splinter on the table between them, looking down at her hands. “I dunno whether it's good y'all showed up or not.”

Daryl feels himself getting sucked into another conversation—and he knows himself; knows they never end well, not for him, and especially not with a slip of a girl like her—but...

But. The blood on his knuckles weighs like a house and his brother sits heavy on his mind, and Daryl finds he doesn't mind the thought of being distracted for a while.

So he pops a bean into his mouth and asks, mouth full and open, “What d'you mean?”

She shrugs, still not looking at him. “I know we weren't safe before. Know we've just been lucky the farm wasn't overrun. Lucky you were the first people to come across us, that all you wanted was help for a little boy and a place to be.” She glances at him. “I love this farm. I grew up here, my Mama... Shawn...” She swallows, visibly holding back tears. Daryl feels the same anxiety he feels whenever women cry in front of him, almost like fight or flight and it's the fight, the engagement, that terrifies him most—but she holds it together. Pushes it down, sticks out her chin. He feels a little bit of pride in her, for that. “I can't even think of leaving. And y'all are a reminder that we might have to. And that scares me.”

“Rick'll keep you safe.”

“Rick's too busy hating Shane and chasing Lori to do much of anything right now,” she says bluntly. Daryl raises his eyebrows, sits a little straighter.

“You caught that too, huh?”

“Yeah,” she says, like it should be obvious. When he doesn't say anything, her mouth quirks. “I don't talk much, but I do listen.”

“You're talking a whole lot now,” Daryl grumbles, but not bad-naturedly.

“There's no one else to talk _to_.” She snorts a little out her nose, looking for the moment very much a teenager. “Everyone thinks I'm some kid to be protected. And I know I can't fight, or do much that's really useful, but it doesn't mean knowing everything that's going on will break me.”

“Why you talking to me, then?”

“You're different,” she says.

Simple, she says it, like there's nothing to explain—the statement simply is. Daryl lets it settle between his ears like a fluttering seed, seeking a crevice to take root.

“Mmph,” Daryl grunts, tearing a bit at the meat. He puts a piece in his mouth, and instantly identifies it as chicken. He'll have to go out hunting soon; wouldn't do to go through all the livestock with winter coming in.

“Food's alright?” she asks, leaning forward like it's important to know.

Daryl nods shortly. “'S fine,” he says.

She smiles, showing straight, white teeth. “Good. I didn't think—“ she trails off, staring at Daryl's plate. He frowns, and suddenly she's there, leaning over the table, curling her fingers underneath his so she's nearly holding his hands. Her touch is light and cool and he would have jumped backwards off his chair if she didn't grip him so firmly.

“The fuck—“

“What happened to your hands?”

A wave of heat passes through his body as he looks at their linked hands—his dirty, scabbing knuckles against her lily-white wrists. He jerks his hands away, avoiding her concerned gaze.

“M'fine,” he mutters.

“You're not fine, you're all bloody, lemme get something—“

“Ain't all mine.”

He doesn't know quite why he says it—probably to get her to stop fluttering around him like a damn bird; chase her off with fear of him, the fear she should remember from this very kitchen.

But she doesn't look afraid. Her eyebrows knit together and she tilts her head, looking at where his hands have disappeared under the table; watching her warily, he slowly brings them back up, leaves them curled against the wood. He rubs at the dried blood again as she continues to watch him.

“What?” he asks, curt.

“This is what everyone's been whispering about—you got someone in the woodshed.”

“Look at you, mini Sherlock Holmes.”

“I'm right, though.” She doesn't even say it as a question; after a moment, a triumphant smile begins to build on her face.

“Ain't nothin' to grin about, girl,” Daryl growls. He's rubbing at the blood again, chipping it away in flakes on the tabletop. “This is serious fucking stuff, ‘specially for you.”

She wrinkles her nose. “For me? What, he wants to steal my horse too?”

He stares at her. Just stares. Takes the moment to sink into her sky blue eyes; show her with his pupils and his lashes exactly how bad it could be. For her. To her. Her more than anyone, because she's slim and pink and looks breakable.

She isn't smiling anymore.

She tugs a little at the hem of her dress. “Oh,” she says.

“Yeah, _oh_.” His foot begins to tap nervously. “Sure you wanna be alone with me now?”

Her brow furrows. “But you ain't the one doing these things—“

“I fucking tortured someone, didn't I?”

His voice cracks a little on the word 'torture', and he ducks his head, rubbing more fiercely at the blood. He's gotten past what belongs to the kid and is working at his own scabs now; fresh red is just starting to spread across his skin when her hand descends once again into his view. He freezes as she touches his wrist; just his wrist, warm-blooded and sun-brown and darkened a hair from the memory of ligatures, that one time Pop chained him to the radiator for eating too much of the old man's kill without permission. The girl's fingernails are clean and neat, bearing a few days of growth past the nail bed; all except her right thumbnail, which is chewed down to the nub. His own bitten thumb twitches as he looks up at her, at her concerned eyes, always concerned, concerned and calm and reaching like two outstretched hands.

“It ain't you,” she says softly.

“The fuck do you know?” he asks, still not drawing away from her hand.

“I know this world ain't the same as the old one. That we gotta grow up.” She swallows; he watches it move down the column of her throat. He remembers the fascination Merle had with women's throats; he kept the two of them piss poor, all the money he spent on shots, just to watch those muscles ripple.

By the time Daryl's made it back up from the past strung like cobwebs across her clavicle, her mouth has quirked. “Besides,” she says; “You listened to me. You didn't take my horse.”

Daryl snorts, looking down at where the pads of her fingers are tracing the vein in his wrist; it's oddly comforting. “Didn't know that's the basis for being a good human being.”

“It's a start,” she says, quiet. Her eyes are large and round as saucers, traveling over his face like a continent.

Daryl shifts in his seat, feeling a blush creeping up his neck. He can't look away from her face—eyes like orbs, mouth a determined line, pale skin slightly sun-tinged from the outside work the new world's pushed her into.

She passes a thumb across his knuckles and holds the finger up to the light. “Look at that,” she says, smiling; “Already stopped bleeding.”

“Yeah,” he grunts, trying not to miss her touch too much. She walks to the sink and comes back with a damp towel. She reaches forward, like she wants to clean him herself, but pauses, and offers him the cloth, cheeks slightly red. He takes it and rubs at his knuckles. Without the dried blood, he sees the skin is hardly cracked. He feels worse than if it had been gushing.

So engrossed in his hands, they are, they're both startled when a voice pipes up from the doorway.

“Beth?”

 _So that's her name,_ Daryl thinks, looking at her, thinking it suits her, before leaning around to see Teenage Tedium staring at him with an emotion more than discomfort, but not brave enough to be suspicion. Daryl reins in the desire to snort; wonders what a girl like her sees in this kid, can't even hold a Dixon's stare. Not that many men can.

“Hey Jimmy,” she says, glancing at Daryl before walking over to kiss Jimmy on the cheek. He seems disappointed she didn't go for the lips, and looks at her with a furrowed brow as she turns to the sink, begins to wash the dishes. They're always washing dishes in this house, like a damn drive-thru, and when Daryl realizes he and her boyfriend are both watching her pretty yellow back he grunts, tearing again into the chicken.

Jimmy looks at him again, visibly straightening his spine. Daryl almost feels sorry for the kid. “Everything alright here?” he asks in what he must think is a very grown up voice.

“It's fine, Jimmy; Daryl just stopped in for some lunch.”

Daryl keeps his eyes on his plate. Jimmy's voice is hushed, as he leans close to Beth, but Daryl's keen ears pick up every word.

“We should tell Hershel to keep him out of the house. I don't want him sniffing around you.”

Beth sighs in exasperation. She doesn't bother to keep her voice down. “He has as much right to be here as anyone else.”

“You gotta stick by me, then, I don't want—“

“Mr. Walsh and Mr. Grimes trust him,” Beth cuts in sharply, words biting like felt-tipped daggers. “He’s protecting all of us, feeding all of us. He’s doing a hell of a lot more than most of them.” Beth glances at Daryl, flushes, and looks at her feet. “You gotta have some trust, Jimmy.”

“Ok, ok,” Jimmy says, placatingly, like he’s speaking to a little girl. “Let's just go back to that book we were reading. ‘Kay?“

“Alright,” Beth says. She wipes her hands on a towel and starts to follow Jimmy out of the room. She pauses, though, before she reaches the door; looks back at Daryl, gaze sparkling like they're the keepers of some sort of secret. “You eat all of that, Mr. Dixon,” she says, in a mockery of the tone she'd used with Jimmy; playful, downright familiar. “I want a clean plate.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Daryl mutters, smiling a little despite himself at the look on Jimmy's face. Daryl pops a piece into his mouth, chews loudly. Beth rolls her eyes, and continues out of the room.

Daryl watches the doorway she vanished into, then looks down at his plate, swallowing thickly. He knows he ought to go straight back out; tell Rick what he's found; lay into Randall some more, see if his beating'd loosened the kid's tongue.

For now, though, he takes a few minutes to sit; to eat chicken and beans in the light of the kitchen; to feel the water, soothing like honey, dry slowly on his cracked, seeping knuckles.


	5. Goes With Mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daryl still isn't any closer to figuring that skinny blonde out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to Mary, as always :)
> 
> The perennial reminder: This fic is NOT following the season two timeline. It contains many of the same events, but I've scrambled them in order to tell a certain story for Beth and Daryl.
> 
> I hope you enjoy :)

The first thing Daryl ever killed, besides the roaches and wasps that infested the filthy split-level of his childhood, was a leghorn chicken Pop had told Merle to steal. Merle'd made sure it was the ugliest-ass chicken on the farm, just to spite the old man, and shit was it ugly—great big tumors coating its face like a Halloween mask, one leg curled and shrunken so it walked with the swinging gait of a peg-legged drunkard. Merle’d been all set to crack its neck between his hands when Pop smacked the back of his head, took hold of the still-struggling bird and thrust it fluttering and wild into Daryl’s arms; tossed the glimmering steel of a switchblade at his feet. The first kill must be made in blood, he said, kicking the hesitant Daryl so hard the bird burst from his arms and it took 10 minutes for Merle to catch it again; 10 minutes in which Daryl cried and Pop swore and blood beside chicken had spilled on the dirt.

By the time Merle returned Daryl was a sniveling mess. He hauled his brother up without a word and shoved the blade into his hand.

Merle was the one holding the chicken’s feet as Daryl slit its throat in three jagged, shallow cuts that sprayed blood over all three of them. Pop had a good laugh, as the chicken died, watching his five year old son covered in mud and blood and snot struggling to pin down the wings slippery with red.

He gave Merle a sound beating, afterwards, because Merle was raising a brother who couldn’t kill a chicken without trembling. Daryl lay safe in bed the whole of that night, but he heard every smack of the belt, and he was still awake when Merle crawled in the next morning.

He doesn’t think of that day, not consciously, as he strings a trio of wild chickens across his belt, walks back to the farm with a jaunty stride.

He doesn’t think about it at all.

* * *

After finding Lori in the kitchen to let her know what they’ll be having for dinner, Daryl heads out to a grouping of boxes on the far side of the stables, sheltered from the house but still within shouting distance.  On his walk over he sees Shane and Andrea talking softly by the RV, heads bowed together; they shoot Daryl a dirty look when they notice him watching, and he turns away, cheeks burning.

If he thought about those kinds of things, he would note that it’s a beautiful day—wind high and clear without a cloud for miles, the blue of the sky bleeding through the sun into the trees and grass. When he sits on the box with a grunt he doesn’t take a moment to enjoy the breeze playing with the hem of his soaked-through shirt; he unties the chickens from his belt, lays two of them on the ground beside himself, takes hold of the third, and begins yanking out its feathers, a handful at a time, mindless of the way they scatter behind him.

“Need any help?”

He looks up and there’s the younger Greene girl, in a far more sensible outfit of jeans, vest, and cowboy boots. She’s between him and the sun and it’s difficult to make out her features as he squints up at her; maybe that’s why it’s so easy to give her a short nod, jerking his chin at the birds on the ground.

“Take your pick,” he says.

She stands over the chickens for a moment before selecting the larger one, holding it with a dainty but sure grip around the neck as she plops down onto the crate across from him. She watches him work for a moment before beginning herself; she can’t pull out quite so many at a time, but she works efficiently, starting at the circle of the bird’s bottom and working up. For a time they work in silence; her eyes on her work, his eyes alternating between his own bird and being dragged to her.

She’s sitting close enough that their knees brush occasionally, and Daryl’s surprised to find he doesn’t mind it; at least, not enough that he would take the effort to move. That would shift her focus onto him, and that’s something he definitely doesn’t want; especially when her distraction means he can sneak his glances—watch the beads of sweat trail down from her hairline, track her hair turned to wisps in the breeze—try to figure this girl out.

She’s been on his mind more than he’d like her to be, in the day since their conversation in the kitchen—so much so that he couldn’t bear facing Randall again with thoughts of her in his head; was worried what he’d do, the shithead gets to talking about certain things. So he’d gone to Rick and aired his worries about using up all the livestock; Rick'd called Hershel over, shared Daryl’s thoughts while Daryl shifted on his feet, avoiding the older man’s eyes. He doesn’t forget what Jimmy’d said, about telling Hershel to keep him out of the house—wondered if the boy had passed on the message, told him he’d caught Daryl speaking with his youngest daughter.

 _Ain’t a crime to talk to someone,_ Daryl thinks—but of course, for him, it is; he remembers the conviction, the indictment in Jimmy’s cornfed gaze when he found Daryl speaking with his girl. As if Daryl’s words were enough to dirty her—as if the words could flip that skirt up the small of her back and rut against the seam of her panties, spread her across the counter and fuck her the way a limp-noodle farm boy couldn’t imagine. As if he wanted something like that.

Now she’s sitting across from him in sensible jeans and demure shirt, plucking the feathers out of a chicken he’d killed for her (for her, for her family, but also for her), a knit in her brow that Daryl does not find endearing. She almost catches him looking at her, but he glances away in time, ripping out feathers roughly enough that little pinpricks of dead blood rise to the surface.

“You know you’re supposed to boil them,” the girl says. Daryl glances at her. “The birds. Pot of hot water’ll make the feathers come off in a jiffy.”

“Don’t wanna waste the fuel,” Daryl grunts, ripping out a patch along the neck. “Got better uses.”

“Could always start up a wood fire.”

“Maybe I like the exercise, huh?”

It comes out meaner than he means it to—or maybe just mean enough, in the moment he can’t tell—and he expects her to pitch a fit; but all she does is look serenely back at him, nodding like it’s the most reasonable thing in the world.

“Cranking that crossbow, guess you get plenty of exercise that way, too.”

“You have a point here, girl?” Daryl asks, pausing in his work and scowling. “Believe it or not I was in a good mood ‘fore you came down here, started chatting me up.”

She shrugs. “Just making conversation.”

“Well. Don’t.”

“Alright.” And she doesn’t. Bows her head and pulls the feathers and acts like he isn’t even there, like she’s sitting here alone where no one from the house can see her, alone and defenseless. It makes Daryl scowl, the sense of responsibility he suddenly feels—not to let her get hurt, not to hurt her himself.

He never asked for this, when he and Merle swaggered into the Atlanta camp, set on leaving them nothing but the clothes on their backs. But they left Merle instead. They left Merle, and they left Daryl with her, this skinny blonde thing, the only one beside Rick doesn’t treat him like trash.

He looks at her sitting with her knees bumping his and he just want to _understand._

“How come you’re hanging around me all the time?”

She looks up at him with a smirk too devilish for her angelic face.

“Thought you didn’t want to talk.”

“Shut up,” he grumbles, ripping out a feather particularly violently. “Just answer the damn question.”

She shrugs, still grinning a little, but tempering it for his sake. “Do I need a reason?”

“Your boyfriend seems to think so.”

“Jimmy thinks cause we went out for three months he can act like we’re married.”

Daryl raises his eyebrows, intrigued despite himself. “Trouble in paradise, huh?”

“It’s never been paradise.”

“He hit you or something?”

He knows even before her head jerks up with a frown that it isn’t true; knows what an abused woman looks like all too well, and knows this sweet girl ain’t it. But there’s something in her that makes those memories rise to the surface in a way that needs expression. He’s never felt that before.

“You think I’d put up with him if he did?”

“Lots’a people do.”

And shit, there she goes looking at him again—that careful, considering, concerned look that makes him shift in his seat and flare red; like she can see straight through to the scars on his back and the burns on his legs, the memories of his mama’s cracked and bleeding face.

“He just doesn’t understand me,” she says quietly. She looks down at her chicken. “I know I don’t have any right to complain—least I got somebody, right?”

Daryl shrugs. “Maybe bein’ alone’s better,” he mutters.

“Maybe,” she says. “But we all need somebody sometime. Don’t you think it’s good to have that, to know it’s there?”

“I don’t need nobody.”

“Why are you here, then? If you don’t need us.”

She’s looking at him like she’s curious, like she really wants to know, like she’s hanging on his words, like she cares—and it makes something in his hardened heart crack open a little.

“Don’t hate you,” he mutters, sinking his hand into the tail feathers. “Just don’t like being ‘round people don’t want me around, ‘s all.”

“We do want you, Daryl,” she says, nudging his knee with hers. “You do so much for us.”

Daryl snorts. “Yeah, killin’ chickens and torturing kids, real useful.”

“Looking for kids too,” Beth murmurs. “And you’re worth more than than. You take care of everyone without ever asking for anything back.”

“What, you think it’s your job, say bullshit like this, try to make me feel better?”

“I admire you,” she says. Her cheeks flush a pretty pink and she ducks her head. She isn’t pulling at the feathers anymore, just running them through her fingers. She avoids his long look. “Rick and Shane’ve been giving us shooting lessons. I’m getting pretty good at it. Maybe I can head out with you someday? Help you look for Sophia.”

“I work better alone,” he says gruffly.

But he still takes a moment to appraise her. Long strong limbs, built for running; biceps that bulge impressively as she yanks at the feathers, sharp eyes and a quiet tongue, shuts up when she’s told to. There’d be worse people to bring with him. It might even be nice, to have a second pair of eyes; maybe let himself relax a bit, enjoy the woods like he used to.

Except he wouldn’t be able to relax, not really. Because being with her means responsibility; means making sure he doesn’t prove the rest of those assholes right. She means proving to himself that he’s more than that.

“Maybe one day,” he amends. “If your daddy says yes.”

He thinks for one horrifying moment that she’s going to hug him, her eyes shine out so bright; but, as if noticing his tension, she resists, looking down at her hands with a smile.

“Thanks, Daryl.”

“Mmph,” he grunts, avoiding her gaze, avoiding her smile. “Where's your daddy think you are, anyway? Thought you weren't supposed to leave the house.”

“I can leave the house if I want to,” Beth says. Daryl raises his eyebrows, and she blushes a little. He likes making her blush. “Fine. He said not to. I was going crazy, though, watching everyone walk in and out while I stayed put. Even Carl gets to go outside.”

“Carl doesn't go, he sneaks.”

“Then it's perfectly fine for me to sneak too.”

She says it in such a prim tone, Daryl can't help but snort. Beth's eyes twinkle, including him in her merry joke; but as Daryl looks at her, the shine slowly fades. He watches in mild horror as she ducks her head, worries her lip and smooths her fingers across the feathers.

“What's the matter, girl?”

Beth shakes her head once, then glances up at him. He resists the urge to look away, flushing, but meeting her gaze head on. She's the one to break it this time, looking at the dead animal in her lap.

“Sometimes I think Daddy and Maggie wish it'd been me who got sick, instead of Mama and Shawn,” she says quietly. Daryl stills in his work, staring at her. “Mama's a lot more like how Maggie is. She wouldn't need to be looked after, like me.”

“Why they think you need looking after?”

Beth looks at Daryl, eyebrows raised. “Daryl, look at me.”

So he looks at her; thinks of what he pictured earlier, the two of them darting through the forest, her long limbs flashing as she easily keeps pace; her eyes sharp and intuitive as they scan the underbrush, the trees. He looks at her, and remembers how she stared him down, the first time they met: how he raged and roared and she stood there, not taking it, exactly, but accepting it—feeling the rain of his wrath and staying dry in spite of it.

“I'm lookin',” he says. “Still doesn't answer my question.

Beth blinks, incredulous. “You really think I'm gonna live through all this.”

“I didn't look much different than you, when I was your age.”

Beth barks a short laugh. “You're joking.”

“Nah; was 'bout your height, blonde, skinny, pr–pretty skinny.”

He swallows, but she doesn't seem to notice his slip up. She's staring at him like she's never seen him before.

Daryl clears his throat and looks at his chicken. The shining flesh, bald and swollen, makes him remember. Remember Merle dragging him from a heap of football kids as they pounded on him; remember his daddy staring him down, forcing him to punch the wall till his knuckles broke so at least he could pretend he'd fought back. Remember hours in the junkyard, heaving tires, throwing chains, loading his bow over and over until his fingers bled and his breath came in gasps. He remembers the way Merle'd look at him, even when he was grown, like he was surprised to find Daryl still around. Like he expected him to prove Pop right.

“No one thought I'd survive either.”

“Huh.” Beth folds her lips into her mouth, looking him over. He fights the urge to tuck into himself; lets her see his cords of hard muscle, his roping scars, his knuckles scarred and bruised against the chicken's pale flesh. When she's looked her fill, she glances up, meeting his eyes. Spots of color appear on her cheeks as she smiles.

“Now whose job is it to make who feel better, Mr. Dixon?”

“Just tellin' the truth,” he mutters, breaking her gaze.

“So was I.” From the corner of his eye, he sees her smile, quiet. “Daryl—“

“BETH!” A faint bang sounds from the direction of the house as Maggie's holler fills the air. Her voice is frantic, harried. “Beth, where are you?!”

“Jesus, she's gonna bring a whole herd down on us,” Daryl says, setting his chicken aside along with Beth's as she stands. He follows her to the edge of the stables, peeking with her around the corner. Glenn and a growing crowd of people are with Maggie on the porch trying to calm her down. Daryl looks down at the girl next to him; is shocked to find she's nearly tucked against his body, under his arm where it rests on the stables; he takes a hurried step back, nearly tripping over his laces.

Beth, thankfully, doesn't notice; just sighs and pushes some hair behind her ear, looks back at Daryl. “Guess I'm missed.” Her attempt at a light smile falls a bit short, but she tries, and Daryl realizes for the first time just how sad she is.

“Yeah,” he says, a little hoarse. She's still looking at him. He shifts under her attention. “Well, go on, get. ‘Fore your sis starts screaming again.”

“Ok.” She turns to go, then pauses, looking back at him. “So you know... you can take Nellie out, if you want. I don't know why I said you couldn't. Guess the rest of me was feeling out of control or something. But it was selfish. You should take her.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” Beth smiles, small. “You'll find that little girl too, Daryl Dixon. I know you will.”

“Too?”

But she's already walking away, ponytail swinging behind her.

Daryl knows he has the chickens to finish—should make good on Beth's offer, get to know the horse before he takes her out in the morning.

But for now, he takes a moment, just a moment, to breathe in the wisp of scent she's left behind; watch the sun, bleeding into blue, as it dances in her long golden hair.


	6. Working Girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was a dumbass move, getting hurt like he did. Convalescing with Beth Greene ain't too great an idea either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reminder that events in this fic are out of order from canon. 
> 
> We're getting to the parts I'm most excited about, y'all!

Daryl is a quick riser; has been, for as long as he can remember, ever since he learned that the early knowledge of a drunken gait or door banged open was the difference between sleeping on his stomach or his back for the next week. Later, when he and Merle shared shit hole apartments and Merle’d come stumbling home, cracked out or methed up the ass, Daryl’d be up and at the door before Merle even found his key, letting him in as his brother laughed.

“Look at this here, wet nurse Dixon. Got a teat needs suckin’ on, or are you just glad to see me?”

Daryl would usher his brother to bed and collapse face first into his space on the sofa where he would toss and turn for the rest of the night, kept awake by Merle’s thunderous snores.

What for a time had been a nuisance has become a survival tactic once again; Daryl never needs to trust the person on watch, because at the first whisper of danger he’ll be awake himself. When they leave the farm—and they will leave it, he has no doubt—the vehicles won’t last them forever. Some day soon it will just be them and the dark and the walkers, and that’s something Daryl is ready for.

But now, there are not the coiled springs of the couch nor the hard rocks of the road against his ribs, but a mattress, feather light and the softest he’s had in his life. The novelty of it does not shock him awake as it should; instead, he swims hazily into wakefulness, snuffling softly against the pillow, hugging the bunched blankets closer to his chest as a warm hand works its way across his back.

It is this last detail that seems most suspect to Daryl’s surfacing mind, and something in him struggles to resist; but the rest is too comfortable, too lulled by these strangest of circumstances, too seduced by an ease he has never known, to even consider rising against it. There is humming coming from behind him, soft, like what he’d imagine a lullaby to be. The hand rises from his skin and returns with something cool, wet, rubbing across his scars and skimming a pucker of tender skin, making him wince.

It’s that little spike of pain—the familiar in so alien a situation—that finally rouses him.

“The fuck—“ He tries to pull away, hissing loudly as a line of pain shoots through his side. He ends up on his back, clutching the blanket to his chest as he looks into the wide eyes of Beth Greene. “The fuck you doing girl?” he asks in an embarrassingly high pitch.

The girl raises her hands as if in surrender, one holding a pink-tinged rag, the other curling until her bitten fingernails graze her palm. “It's alright, Daryl,” she says, “I'm just changing your bandages.”

“Where's Hershel?” he asks. Her eyes flicker down and he pulls the blanket higher on his chest.

“He needed to talk to Mr. Grimes about something.” She lowers her hands and steps back to the edge of the bed. “I've done this a million times, Daryl,” she says, softly, like she's gentling a horse. “I promise, I won't screw it up.”

“That ain't...” He trails off as she looks at him; so soft, so concerned, so fucking, _fucking_ young. Too young to see, too young to know, too young to imagine the map of shame told in his scars.

He closes his eyes, exhales roughly, swallows. When he opens his eyes she hasn't looked away, but she doesn't look concerned either. She just looks. She looks at him, with her wide blue eyes, her soft mouth fluttering as she breathes. She breathes, and she looks at him.

Daryl blinks again, swallows again, then slowly rolls back onto his side, wincing a little as the movement stretches his stitches. It takes a moment, but then he hears the creak of floorboards, feels the dip of the bed as she sits. She doesn't begin immediately, and as the silence stretches Daryl's stomach grows tighter and tighter. He shouldn't have said anything; should've just pretended to sleep, let her continue on until the job was done. Now he's gone and made her notice what was there to notice, and he feels her eyes like a physical trail being trod across his skin, following the loops and lines back in time, before the world ended, while his was in the midst of.

By the time she touches him he's sunk himself into that past, and the warmth of her hand draws a whimper from his chest. He freezes; squeezes his eyes shut, embarrassed. But she continues as if she hadn't heard. Her hands don't linger as he expects them to, but return to the wound. He hadn't let Hershel clean him up beyond what was necessary; had done the rest himself, slowly, painfully, with a rough cloth and basin of water. Beth seems determined to get to what he missed. She moves slowly, methodically, and eventually Daryl's stiffened spine relaxes a fraction. It's almost soothing, the steady rub of the rag on his skin, the occasional surprise of her wrist or fingers not as shocking as it should be. After a time he even finds himself relaxing into her ministrations, pushing back as if that would move more of her skin onto his; when she leans across him to get to the wound at the front, he lets his breaths grow deep, to feel the brush of her shirt every time he inhales. He lets his eyes slide closed so he doesn't have to look at her; doesn't have to think about the softness of the bed or the gentleness of her hands, the way even her father, with all his expertise, could not make him feel so taken care of. He doesn't think he's ever felt taken care of in his life.

He must have fallen into a light doze, because it takes him a while to realize that he can feel the itchy pressure of the bandage again, and that her hands have stopped moving. She still sits beside him on the bed, one palm curled around his side a little above the binding. He can feel her pulse through her thumb, just as slow as his own. He clears his throat, shifting a little, and tries not to feel disappointment when she moves her hand away.

“Feel ok?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, voice rough from its lethargy. “Thanks.”

“No thanks needed.” She sits, and he feels the vibrations on the bed as she taps her fingers. “You mind if I stay here a bit?” she finally asks.

Daryl shrugs, staring at the far wall. “'S your house.”

He's confused when he feels her rise from the bed. He's about to twist around and look for her when he hears two soft thumps on the floor; then she's moving into his line of vision. Before he can refocus his eyes on her moving body she's crawled her way up the bed. Daryl tenses with every inch she climbs, and by the time she settles on her back with a bounce his shoulders are once again like plywood.

She doesn't make any move towards him, though; just lies there, hands folded across her stomach as she gazes at the ceiling, torso rising and falling with her breaths. After a few minutes Daryl's body begins to loosen again; slowly, to not jostle the bandaging, he rolls onto his back, tugging the blanket up under his arms. She shifts to release the sheets from beneath her weight, but otherwise gives no notice of him. He tries to keep his eyes on the ceiling as well, but can't help the way they drift back to her; not to search, or to find, but to look, like she'd looked at him. Like it's something they still have time for, to look without reason.

He sees the moment she comes back to herself with a sharp inhale, and he quickly turns his eyes with hers to the ceiling, clearing his throat and twisting an arm up behind his head, letting the other rest on his stomach. It's his turn to feel her eyes on him. It isn't as discomfiting as he expects it to be, but it still doesn't feel natural, and his scalp prickles as he waits for her to speak.

He surprises both of them when the first words spoken are his.

“'M sorry about your horse,” he says, fighting not to glance at her. “Your dad said how torn up you were.”

He feels her shrug in the vibrations of the mattress. “Yeah, well. More worried about you, to be honest.” Daryl does turn his head to look at her, now, meeting her soft blue eyes. As he watches, she smiles. He can tell it's forced. She lifts her arm and punches his shoulder softly, barely a tap. “Don't do that again, Dixon.”

“Ain't planning on it,” he says. She's still watching him so he looks back up at the ceiling, speaks to the air. “Wasn't sure I was gonna make it, this time.”

“Course you made it. It's what we do.”

Daryl's mouth twitches at the 'we', at the strangeness that has become the two of them, but he doesn't comment on it. He resettles his head on his arm, chewing his lip distractedly.

“Were you scared?” Beth asks.

He wonders why she asks that question. He knows it isn't to mock him; however short the time he's known her, he knows her well enough to know that derision is as foreign to her as somewhere like Morocco is to him. It isn't to mock, and he doesn't think it's something as simple as curiosity. Maybe she just wants to know. To know how he sees himself. To know him.

“Yeah,” he finds himself saying. He glances at her, too fast to register anything but a pale blur before he's back looking at the ceiling. “Yeah, I was scared.”

“I'm sorry,” she says.

Daryl snorts softly. “You should be. Was your damn horse that threw me.”

“That wasn't what I meant,” she says. He can hear the smile in her voice. “I'm sorry you got hurt, 's all.”

“Well. Still your damn horse.”

She punches him again, just as light as the last. This time she lets her hand linger near his pillow. He feels her shift, and when he glances at her again she's curled up on her side, watching him, a soft smile tugging at her lips. His own lips twitch before he remembers himself; and even then, he can't force them to turn down.

As Daryl watches, Beth's gaze turns inward again, and she ducks her head to look at her hands, twisting together in front of her face. Daryl fights the urge to still them with his own. Instead, he stays silent, and watches; listens to the hush of her breath, the wind blowing softly outside, the strange peace he feels with this girl at his side.

“Can I ask you a question?” she asks, still not looking at him. “It's sort of unrelated.”

“Shoot,” he says. He raises his thumb to his mouth. She looks up.

“Do you think I should have sex with Jimmy?”

If Daryl were drinking, he would have sprayed it all across her face. As it is, he misses the nail and bites into his thumb, hard, eyes widening at both the pain and the guilelessness in her own.

“Excuse me?” he forces out.

“I said—“

“Girl, I heard you. Don't repeat it, for Christ's sake.”

“Why not?”

Daryl stares at her, incredulous. “That ain't... you don't just _ask_ people that.”

“Well. I'm asking you.”

“You—fuck.” Daryl looks at the ceiling, shaking his head and trying to pull himself together. When he looks back at her she's still watching him with that innocent, imploring gaze.

Daryl gives up. He breathes out sharply. “I mean, do you want to?”

Beth shrugs, serene as anything, as if she hadn't just made him near-hyperventilate. “I dunno. Maggie thinks I should.”

Daryl stares at her. Now it's Beth who won't meet his gaze. “She told you that?”

“She implied it.”

“I thought she'd be fixin' to scalp the kid if he touched you.”

Beth picks at her nails, still avoiding his eyes. “She's worried. About all the time he spends with Shane. With Andrea.” Beth rolls her eyes, and Daryl can just about picture the conversation in his head—Maggie thinking she's being subtle, intimating all these jealousies Beth should have. He figures Beth isn't the type of girl to get jealous, not really; figures she'd see the emotion itself as a sign of something broken. He isn't so sure about that—doesn't quite know the line between security and apathy, hasn't experienced either enough to decide—but he can tell that whatever entreaties Maggie made fell on deaf ears. Beth isn't worried about Andrea.

“What's the problem with that? Ain't the cuddliest people but the boy seems tough enough.”

“Stop calling him a boy,” Beth says, twisting her mouth. “Makes the whole thing even weirder.” She's finally looking at him again. Daryl isn't sure whether to be glad of it or not. “She thinks I'm losing him; that when your group leaves, he won't want to stay with me. With us. That he'll go with you, and there won't be anyone to protect us.”

“Y'all can handle yourself.”

Beth's mouth quirks. “I think you'd be the only one who thinks that, but thanks.”

“I ain't just saying it.” Daryl shifts, considers lowering his arm so he can pull the blanket higher, but decides against it. “That dad of yours is a tough son of a bitch. And you girls ain't got much experience, but you'd be alright.”

Her eyes are shining at him in that unidentifiable way, like she's committing something about the moment to memory. Daryl shifts again, raises his hand to suck on his reddened thumb.

“Thank you.”

“'S just the truth.”

“Still. You're the only one who ever says that kind of truth. So thank you.”

Daryl shrugs, trying to temper the heat in his cheeks. “Ain't nothing.” She's still looking at him, and he searches for something to say. “So your sister's pimping you out for protection? That's what's going on?”

“I wouldn't call it _pimping_... just... bodily persuasion?” They stare at each other—then at the same moment they break, Daryl into chuckles and Beth into giggles, shaking the bed with it. “Jesus, she is, isn't she?”

“That's what I'd call it.”

“God.” Beth shakes her head, curling herself into a loose ball and linking her hands across her knees. “What has this world made us, huh?”

“Don’t think it’s done changing you yet.”

“Yeah. Probably.” She looks up at him, through her eyelashes, thick and golden. “So. Should I?”

And with that Daryl remembers exactly what they're talking about, and the tension comes rushing back. He turns from her to look at the ceiling. “The idea don't seem to excite you much.” Daryl chews his lip, wishing he knew more languages so he could curse himself in them. “You get all that far yet?”

“We haven't had time to do much. It's just been kissing.”

“And no one else...”

“No.”

 _I'm lying in bed with a virgin,_ Daryl thinks, the words filtering through his head as if through cheese cloth. He doesn't stamp them out as quickly as he should.

“He did touch me over the bra once. That was nice.”

Daryl snorts, trying to cover his panic. “Girl, you think that was just _nice_ , he ain't doing it right.”

“What's it supposed to be like then?”

Daryl makes the mistake of looking at her. She's shifted her head a little higher on her pillow, tilted herself a little farther towards him. She's looking at him with such innocence, such pleading, that he doesn't know quite what to do with himself.

“More'n nice,” Daryl grumbles, looking at his hand spread across his stomach. When he looks at her he sees her gaze has followed, and he quickly bends the knee closer to her.

“You've had it good then?”

“Where is this going, Beth?” Daryl growls.

She seems taken aback by the vehemence of his response. “Nowhere. I just wanna know.”

“You ask too many questions.”

“Fine. Sorry.” Beth tucks her knees closer to her chest. Her eyelashes make tiny shadows on her cheeks as she blinks. Her eyes slide open and shut.

Daryl feels like a dick.

“'S been fine,” he grumbles, looking at the ceiling. He feels her eyes back on his face, and it makes his cheeks heat. “Ain't too hard to make a man feel good.”

“It's harder for women then?”

“'S what I've heard.” He looks at her again, scowling. “Don't you have a sister to tell you this stuff?”

Beth smiles without humor. “Maggie ain't exactly around all that often.”

Daryl snorts. “Shit. Glenn must be a better lay than he looks, he makes your sister less available than me.”

Beth rolls her eyes, but at least some genuineness is back in her smile. “She's always been like that. It's not her fault. Just doesn't know how to care about more than one thing at a time.”

“Gotta choose one thing, it ought'a be you, I think.”

Beth doesn't give him the time to be embarrassed; just smiles, ducks her head, and Daryl has the absurd urge to reach up and touch her cheek right where that smile for a moment had curved. It looks soft, her cheek; smooth and rounded like the edge of a globe, mapped in a flush like continents. Daryl thinks of other cheeks he has seen: pockmarked and sallow, eroded by years of betrayal and hard living, of abuse and despair. His mother's own cheeks, bruised near to the bone by his father's fists; the cheeks of a whore around his cock, paid for by Merle and tolerated by him as she gets him off in the back room of a bar or the alley outside—coated in powder an inch thick, a surface the consistency of a spongecake when he makes the mistake of touching it for a moment, a moment when he forgets what desire is for a man like him. He feels himself forgetting now; forgetting the curves of her body and what her father would say and seeing only the plush of that cheek, skin uncovered and uneven but pale, sweet, a land to press the lips to.

He loses himself long enough that she's looking at him again—at his skin rough and decayed, the scars of bar fights and knife fights and his father's hard, hard hands. The bruises they lay to the bone. He pictures her hands in their place and feels weak with it.

“You wanna keep going with Jimmy?”

Beth looks at him, searches his face. When Daryl swallows, her eyes follow the bulge of his throat, down and down as she blinks.

“No,” she finally says. She meets his eyes again. “No, I don't.”

“Then don't.”

“What choice do I have?”

“You always have a choice, Beth.” Daryl swallows. “None'a this matters, anyway,” he says firmly. “We ain't leaving till we find Sophia, and Rick sure as hell ain't gonna abandon y'all, after all you did for us. I'll whup him if he tries.”

“It isn't the same, though,” Beth says quietly. “We aren't Rick's family. Family's all we've got left in this world. He's gotta choose, he'll choose them.”

“Family ain't never done shit for me,” Daryl says, vehemently enough that Beth raises her eyebrows. “'Cept for Merle. And look what I did to him, huh?” Daryl swallows, blinking harshly. “Blood don't mean nothin', not now, not then. Just something to get people to believe stuff that don't exist. What _matters_ is, I ain't leaving you. So don't fuck your boyfriend, and quit fucking fussing.”

He forces himself to hold her eyes, now; tell her through them his conviction, the decision he didn't even know he'd made until he said it.

He isn't going to leave her. It's as simple as that.

“Have you ever had it good?” Beth asks quietly.

“No,” he says. He won't meet her eyes, but he feels them on him—watching, always watching. “Just something to do. Make Merle happy.” Daryl snorts. “Guess the world ended at just the wrong time for us, huh.”

He looks at her. Silence but for the wind beyond the window. A smile spreads across Beth's face, and he watches, as if in slow motion, as she reaches across his body to place her hand on his, curl her fingers between until he can feel the points of her nails on his stomach through the sheet. He swallows, tries to ignore the way the pressure on him feels, the slight, shimmering weight of her.

“Nah,” she says quietly, looking into his eyes. She tightens her fingers across his.

It takes him a few moments, but he tightens his back.

“I think it was just right.”


	7. Cricket on the Hearth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's taciturn, he's a baby, he's a grumpy son of a bitch, but he doesn't care. 
> 
> He's Daryl Dixon, and at age seven he got lost in the woods.
> 
> At age 35, he's stumbled out, blinded by the light, and it feels like he's losing himself all over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rating change isn't major, but I wanted to be safe.
> 
> Thanks to Mary as always :)
> 
> Warning for off-screen suicide attempt.

In his youth, Daryl was always running. Running sneakers from his feet and scabs off his knees, running to trouble, running away from it. He was never a great sprinter—not built for it, the football coach said: all arms, no guts, limbs splayed akimbo as he attempted to rocket across the field. He gave up on football when he saw the price of equipment, anyway; and he got his running in other ways. Dashing through the woods as his father pursued him, eyes glowing red like his hand around his belt, snapping in the wind; darting down alleys and side streets, Merle's whoops in his ears and guns discharging left and right. Daryl is used to his running.

Some days he wishes he could fly.

The air burns his lungs and the grass his legs as his jeans whip around his ankles, cut through the brush, through the long fields back to the house. The sun has just got its eye on setting, throwing Daryl's long shadow before him as he pounds across the turf, chasing his unwary partner. The house burns bright, dangerous in these times but insisted-on nonetheless. To a walker and to a man in the building night it shines.

All but one second floor window. All but one.

* * *

Daryl has seen things. He has _done_ things, things he wishes he could erase like Merle did with drug and drink. He has been a child and seen the horrors of the world, in all its wild black and red hues.

He'd never seen anything like this.

His arm slinging around Carol's boney shoulders, yanking her to his chest as they tumble together like toppling trees. The sweat from the small of her back soaking through his shirt front to tickle his belly. Her scent, like the Dial soap the Greenes use and the dust that chokes his mouth, his lungs, grits in his eyes. Her little girl stumbling from the barn, and the way she crumbles.

He's never seen anything like this. He's never cared like this either.

* * *

Lori, like always at times like these, it seems, is the one to brave him.

He sees her coming from a long way off. That's why he chose this spot, the first day they arrived: back to the shed, side to the woods, the farm and her fields stretching before him like the pastoral in a painting. He's chipping at a hunk of wood at random. He started it a few days ago, with the hazy thought of making it a songbird, maybe a horse—now he hacks against the grain, watching the splinters fly, whittling it down to nothing.

He’s so damn angry. At the world. At himself. At Carol for birthing the child in the first place. At the girl for not knowing enough to fucking stay put.

But no one made him care, he knows. No one made him spend those days in the woods. No one made him drop Carol in the dust, sprint away, ignore all commotion behind him.

He sees Lori coming but he feels nothing about it. He's felt nothing beyond the roil in his gut these past two days. The familiar storm behind his eyes. The land rocking and rolling. At these times he seeks his solitude; fears what he could be to anyone in his vicinity. Fears what he could do.

He feels nothing as Lori approaches, only a cool, muted annoyance. He's surprised it's taken this long for someone to seek him out, to be honest; thought at least that one of them would bring him food, that she... But he's been alright, he had jerky in his pack, he had berries he picked by the stream, squelched in his hand till they ran in red.

Lori's come up to him now; hovers just at the edge of his space, a wider radius than even his normal, far-flung spread. As if she knows the range of his spring, now, as he's backed into a corner. Knows as the wood-chips fly he's reached his end.

“Daryl,” she says.

He doesn't acknowledge her, not even a grunt. Just keeps whittling, keeps chopping away. What once might have been a beak or a muzzle is mangled beyond repair, the gut gaped and open. He wishes he'd saved some of the berries now, to paint it as it's supposed to be.

“Daryl.”

His boots are sturdy where they rest on the earth, his neck tense as his shoulders sag. Somewhere in the woods beyond the birds have paused their singing, either flown off or bedded for the anticipated night, in silence, listening. Waiting for the cue, the tap of the baton, the _da capo_ to begin again.

_“Daryl.”_

She's kneeling in front of him now and he nearly takes her eye out with the surprised cut he makes. She barely flinches as she glares at him, half exasperation, half concern, the mother in her unable to look on his dirty cheeks and not feel ashamed. Ashamed for waiting, for not looking harder. For the embarrassment of seeing him like this, for the pity she's obliged to feel, for a creature like him.

“What?” he grunts.

“Hershel's gone. I can't find him and and one of the horses is missing.”

“So what?”

“Rick and Shane went out into the woods. I need you to go tell them to find him.”

“Do it yourself,” Daryl mutters, setting his face mean, setting it hard, living every inch the monster women like her fear.

But she doesn't look afraid. She looks tired. At the edge of beaten, though she'd never let anyone know it, not even herself. She rubs her forehead, staining it from the hand that had rested in the dirt. The grit mixes with her sweat like some kind of makeup, a new mineral uncovered, un-marketed. A blush of the grave.

“Please don't do this, Daryl,” she says, as close as he's ever heard her come to begging. He sees her out of the corner of his eye, head bowed, beseeching his boots. “Carol isn't talking, Beth tried to kill herself, I can't do _everything_ on my own—“

“Beth?”

He's looking at her now, his knife stilled, about to slit the songbird's throat.

Lori looks at him with annoyance. “Yes. Hershel's other daughter. The one that isn't Maggie.”

“I know who—the fuck did she do?”

Lori shakes her head and Daryl feels the tempest building in his gut, the strum and swirl and how can her lips move so damn _slow_. “She collapsed in the kitchen. She tried to take a steak knife, but Maggie talked to her—we thought she'd be ok but we left her with Andrea—“

“She's ok? She's alright?”

Lori shakes her head. “We stitched her up as best we could, but she won't talk to Maggie.” Lori looks at his expression and mistakes it for disgust. “She's just a kid, Daryl; she needs her dad; she needs—“

He doesn't hear what she needs. He already has his bow. He's already running.

* * *

He reaches the porch and stands panting, heaving, the flight of his feet and the heat of his panic siphoning his breath as if from a hose. He looks behind him, and sees that Lori didn't follow. She's making a beeline for the woods. He feels a twinge of worry, that she would go by herself.

He looks at the house, its lights, and he forgets. He steps inside.

He is not practiced with these grand old houses, but the art of stealth is not so different here from the woods. He's walked through the foyer enough; has watched others do it, knows which boards squeak. The stairs are a worry, but he can hear Maggie and Patricia talking in the kitchen. The rest of the house is still. His footsteps could be but the wind in the rafters. He creeps his way upstairs.

It looks a different planet, the way any unseen space seems to be—the landing a short hallway lined with doors, a smaller stair to the attic rising behind him. Most of the doors are slightly agape, carelessly left open in the family's security. He debates stopping in the bathroom, wash the dirt from his face, but the harsh pound of his heart can't take such pauses. He continues on to the one closed door.

The room is painted a pale yellow, the color of daffodils, of the corn in summer. It is small, but sweet—a bookshelf with Austen and Tolkien sits nestled against a plush armchair, the window behind sealed shut, a stale taste in the air. White curtains flank the glass. He pictures them fluttering in this room of flowers, the clippings and pastings of homework and friends and loves gone by spotting the walls like pollen, the breeze light as rain as it falls across the small double bed.

Even his sharp hunter's eyes miss the blonde of her hair against the white fabric at first pass, and it takes him a moment to realize she is there, buried beneath the heaping comforter. He freezes with the door still open behind him, his hand stuck to the knob as if by glue. She is turned away from the door. The door leading to what must be a bathroom is edged with duct-taped splinters. He could never miss the forgotten and familiar spots of blood on the carpet.

“Go away, Maggie,” she mumbles.

Daryl swallows, gripping the knob like a lifeline, like his one road back. He could leave right now. He could creep back down the steps, retrieve his satchel, his bike, disappear into the falling night. He could never see a soul again.

She shifts, huddling deeper in her cavern and suddenly the curve of her neck emerges. The back of it, half-hidden by hair and by white and nearly white itself, but there, the proof of her life in the heat beneath it, the quivering follicles. The heart he'd felt pressed to his back as she cleaned him.

“S'not Maggie.”

The air leaves her like a magician unfurling multi-colored cloth, dragged from her mouth in a continuous strain, drifting and lifting and sinking like lead in the heat of the room. He doesn't know how she can breathe at all, beneath those blankets, and he would open the window if he could look away from her but he can't; something like the remnants of that wizard's string have snaked around and inside his own ribcage, tightened his lungs into a fluttering noose to hang the organs between. They balance on those rafters, tipped to fall. He shuts the door.

He goes slowly, and loudly, as loudly as he can allow himself. Sets his bow by the door. Takes careful steps towards the bed, shucking his vest as he goes, folding it in quarters and laying it on the side table. He kneels and unties his boots; in glancing down he sees the trail of mud he left behind on her clean light rug; avoids the tightening of his chest as he rises and creates the smallest gap in the sheets that he can. He slides in behind her, clumsy and jostling and she refuses to shift to give him space; but when he's settled with his hand beneath him and his other hovering, fluttering down to brush her hip beneath the sheets, to curl his hand across it and feel the sticky heat of her skin through her tank top, she seems to sink; to melt into him, loosening her muscles' grip on her bones and falling back like water.

The first press of her to him is a shock, and he takes a moment just to breathe, to fight the flight his body screams for as she slides into his space. He closes his eyes, he swallows, and he pushes past it; and once his heart is calmed he can slide his hand further, pressing against her stomach and pulling her closer to him until she must just feel the brushing rough of his jeans. His lips could touch her dirty hair, but they don't, not yet—now is the time to breathe, to hold, to learn the thrum of the other's presence and their quiet movements. From this close Beth no longer lies like stone; she twitches every few moments, like aborted attempts to get comfortable, or her body fighting the lure of sleep. Whatever it is, he learns to anticipate it, pushing on her stomach at the prompt of each, and soon they gentle, soften, as if they had not occurred at all. Without him noticing it her breath falls into his rhythm, until they could each be a single cell, and the bed a giant lung.

Daryl does not know how long they lie like this; long enough for the dark room to get darker, for dusk to fall and the cicadas to sing. Even in this, the age of death, they sing; and he thinks of his songbird with the slit throat and his fingers itch to begin again.

But his fingers have all they need, here; his arm grows numb beneath him and he shifts, pulling her tight a moment for leverage, tight until she gasps, so he can slide his pinging arm beneath her head, relax again with her head now tucked against the crook of his, so he cannot avoid breathing her in, the smell of her scalp beneath her hair and the rise of the strands like redwoods. He knows she can feel his breath against her neck; sees it stir the light hairs that dust the knob of her spine. But she does not comment, does not move. She lies, rising and falling with their breaths, her skin somehow cooler than when he entered. And he feels cool too; not cold, but comfortable, like beneath this blanket is a world beyond the Georgia heat, beyond the ghosts that roam the land and sea. It is an ocean, a continent, and his hand on her stomach and his face in her hair the anchor that keeps them from drifting.

Her voice is so quiet, when she speaks, he only knows she's used it from the vibrations of her abdomen. He leans in closer, nose now butting against the shell of her ear and he catches a whiff of the scent of its crease.

“What'd you say?”

Beth shifts her shoulders, and he draws back, in case she wants to move. But she settles back in, now with her hand over his, entwined over her tank top, her bare forearm pressed along his sleeve.

“You gonna ask me why I did it?”

Daryl ducks his head to look at her shoulder. Bare but for the strap, a finger's width, her skin is flat and colorless in the shade of the dark. He can make out a dusting of freckles by his nose, and if his neck could reach he would press his forehead to them, his cheek; would hear their secrets.

“No.”

“No?” she whispers.

“No.” He lets his fingers curl with hers, against her stomach, and she holds him like she wants him to feel something inside her, something struggling to emerge.

“Why?”

“Why no?”

“Yeah.”

“Cause you're still here. It don't matter why. You're here.”

He doesn't know why his throat thickens on that second pass; doesn't know where it comes from, this urge to tuck into her even tighter, to roll them into a ball with no beginning or end, a pantomime of a seashell curled into eternity.

“You don't want me to tell you?” she asks, voice small. “I would, you know. Tell you.”

He shrugs. He knows she feels it. “Only if you wanna.” He rolls his head on the pillow, watches the slope of her cheek. “You wanna?”

“I don't know.” Her thumb strokes against the back of his hand, again and again, rhythmic like an ocean. “I just want this out of me.”

“This?”

“This.”

She presses his hand tighter against her, tighter, tighter, and he feels it—the heft of it, the knot of her despair.

The linking knot, indistinguishable, of her desire to live.

“Can't help you with that,” Daryl says, pressing his forehead into her hair. “I'm just gonna... I dunno. I'll do what you want me to do.”

“Thank you,” she whispers. She turns, then; rouses her body like it's been asleep for years. He helps her along; sliding his hand along her stomach to her hip, turning her and resettling his hand on her back, adjusting his legs until their knees just brush, like children in the womb. He looks at her and her eyes are larger than he's ever seen them, red rimmed even in the darkness. Beneath her nose is the same shade. As he looks at her she sniffs, wipes her nose on the blanket. She looks worried for a moment, like she's offended him, but his lips only twitch and the lines of her face relax as far as she'll allow them.

Again he waits for her to speak. He's had the practice. He can wait a long time.

She doesn't make him.

“Maggie thinks I'm a coward,” she says.

There is no hesitation.

“Maggie can suck a crocodile's dick.”

They stare at each other; and Beth breaks into giggles. And they turn into laughs. And those turn to sobs. And soon she's crying against him, huddled closer than he's ever been to another human being, merging with his chest to tangle her hands in his ribcage. Her face is half buried in his throat, half in his shirt, and she's full of snot and tears but it hardly moves him; he strokes her back and lifts her hair from her over heated-neck, lies as still as he can so she can use him as she will, mold a keep from his mountain stone. His arms close about her like a castle, his mouth the moat as it flows along her hairline, never a kiss, just a brush, a barest sensation of chapped lips and warm breath to know he lives and breathes against her. And that she breathes with him.

As her sobs calm to hiccups and her hiccups to sighs, she relaxes again to his rhythm. Her hands are curled between them, crushed between their chests, and he feels the press of her bandage like benediction.

He sees the line of dark running through it; whatever stitches they'd made, they were not sufficient. But he holds his tongue. She bleeds through her eyes now, not her wrist; no need to remind her of the other.

“I'm sorry,” she says, voice thick with mucous and shame.

“Ain't nothing,” he says. He tries to smile, for her sake. “You think girl snot's the worst thing I've gotten on me?”

It works. She's giggling again. Wetly, but a giggle. The vibrations move their way into his chest, move him, and there's still a little lift to his lip when she settles.

She sighs, but not as sadly as she had been. “I'm a mess,” she says.

He looks at her. Her golden hair flat and dull, stuck to her forehead with sweat; face red and blotchy with a trail of clear liquid running from her nose before she wipes it away; the bags under her eyes puffed up from crying until her eyeballs could use them as life-rafts.

“You really are, girl,” he says, running a finger along her brow to unstick the hair, tucking it behind her ear. He touches her jaw as he pulls away, making her shiver. She smiles at him, and he feels his heart pound in his chest a little, the gravity of what they're doing catching up to him. He didn't lock the door; someone could come in at any moment; he's surprised her crying didn't call to Maggie like a breeding heifer to a bull.

He can see exactly what it looks like, too: the muddy trail his boots left on the floor, his leather stark black against the pale of the room, just like his dirty tanned skin on her white sheets, her white flesh, her white smile while his remains un-doctored and crooked. He sees them tangled up in each other, Beth in nothing but long (thank god) pajama pants and a tank top (and underwear, please be wearing underwear), his large arm bulging as it lies atop her, heavy enough that she'd have to exert herself to move it, strong enough he could pin her down with a fraction of his strength. He sees what they would see—his rough unshaven face inches from her swanning neck, silky white and nearly translucent. Just a brush of his beard would leave a mark, he thinks, not to mention what a suck would do, and they would see him do it, suck across her collarbone and down her chest to pull out what must be the prettiest pink nipples he's seen in his life, expose them to the air before sealing his lips around them, head turned just so, so Maggie in the door can see the sneer on his face, the cannibalistic urge to devour her pure virgin sister.

Daryl's cock is pounding and he's lightheaded and Beth is looking at _him_ with concern now, like _he's_ the one deserves her sympathy and care, like he isn't the man imagining licking along the edge of her fresh bandage, pinning it up out of the way as he plays with her, out of sight, out of thought as he sinks his hands into the curls beneath her pajama bottoms ( _she can't be wearing underwear,_ his racing mind whispers in a voice almost like Merle's, _too hot, too steamy, nice girls like her don't want to stain their pretty little panties_ —)

“Daryl?”

He blinks, and her little hand is on his cheek. He realizes he's breathing in hard panicked gasps like he'd just begun to drown. He swallows hard, squeezing his eyes shut and ordering down his agitated cock, even as Merle whispers in his ear how close he is, how alone they are, how long, long, _long_ it's been—

But her little hand is on his rough-hewn cheek, thumb sliding across his cheekbone like she's testing the edge of a knife. His mouth is open as he gazes at her. Her large blue eyes so close, tucking him in like the sweetest of songs, her hand warm and a little damp and grounding. Finally, his heart-rate goes down, his breaths slow, and his cock at last lies still.

He closes his eyes and breathes out a slow stream of air, like carbon dioxide escaping a punctured balloon.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

“That's ok,” she whispers, still stroking his cheek, still lying close, so unaware of the monster in her bed. Daryl closes his eyes and ducks his head, wanting to hide from her gaze. When he feels her lips against his forehead he jerks up in surprise, knocking her jaw with his skull.

“Fucking shit, I'm sorry—“

And then she laughs. A laugh, a real laugh; a quiet one, but real. It makes something in Daryl's chest beat funny, to see her grin like that through red-rimmed eyes.

“Stop apologizing to me, Daryl,” she says, with a hint of her usual spirit. “Just cause I tried to kill myself doesn't mean you gotta change who you are around me.”

Saying the words doesn't seem to lessen her mirth, but it sobers Daryl—reminds him why he's here, what he's doing. What he wants to do. What he's trying. Whatever the fuck that is.

“Ain't cause'a that,” he mumbles. He strokes his thumb a few times across the bit of skin peeking out below her tank top; he decides to ignore her shiver.

“What is it then?”

Daryl shrugs, rustling the blankets. “Messed up a lot lately,” he says; barely audible, but he says. “Don't wanna screw this up too.”

“You won't,” she says. She kisses his forehead again; runs her fingers across the spot like she's trying to memorize it. “You're doing fine. Just, you being here, it's...” She shakes her head. “It's everything,” she whispers.

Daryl shifts, blushing. “Dunno 'bout that...”

“If that's the way I say it is, that's the way it is, Daryl Dixon.”

“A'right, girl. A'right.”

“Good.” She looks suddenly nervous; she pulls her hands back into her chest, looking at them, touching the edge of the bandage.

“What's wrong?”

She glances up at him, looking shyer than he's ever seen her. “Can you—can you stay for a bit? I know you probably got stuff to do—“ Daryl snorts, and she pauses, questioning. He shakes his head, indicating she should go on. “Just... just till I fall asleep, at least.”

Daryl thinks about the dark blood against her arm. About Maggie in the doorway. About her hand on his cheek.

In the end it doesn't matter.

“Told you before, girl. I a'int leaving you.”

The way she looks at him, he could almost believe she understands what that means.

* * *

The waking is slow. It's heavy. It's soft, like swimming through cotton balls, like emerging from the heaving sea.

Someone is calling his name, shaking his shoulder. His eyes open slowly, blinking. He's tangled in a heavy bundle of sheets; he can feel the cooling sweat of sleep everywhere his skin touches fabric. The room is at full dark, but he can see Beth's face clearly as she leans over him.

“Hey,” he says softly.

“God, finally,” she says, her whisper strangely urgent. “Daryl, you gotta get up, get your shoes on.”

Daryl knows he's missing something; there's something important to know, about why he fell asleep curled around her like a sweater and now he's alone in the drying sheets, looking up at her steadily panicking face.

“Wha's going on?” he asks, scrubbing at his face. He feels groggy, like he's been drugged. He's never been in a sleep that deep before.

“I heard something and I didn't want to wake you, but then I got up and saw—“

“Fucking hell, girl, spit it out.”

He understands, though, through his sleep-muddled mind, the moment before she says. Why he can see her so clearly in the dead of night. Why her pale cheeks glow orange like flame. Why he can smell the scent of smoke, creeping in the opened window.

He checks his bow is by the door. She extends a shaking hand.

“The barn is burning.”

** END OF PART I **


	8. Looking to You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The farm has fallen, the group is scattered, and Daryl has a promise to keep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a lot more I could do to this chapter but I'm sick of looking at it. So here ya go.
> 
> Thank you to Mary for her amazing edits.

Daryl is pissed, and he doesn't know why.

He knows why. Of course he knows why. He was right, wasn't he? You don't keep lights on past dark, not without boarding the windows; you don't stay in one place, you don't make noise, you don't fall asleep in young girl's beds.

He isn't thinking about that now. He isn't thinking about that.

And now he's here, in the asscrack of nowhere, sitting across the fire from a taciturn Carol and silently running through the whole lot of nothing they've got on them.

_Hunting knife, switchblade, crossbow, six bolts, pistol, steak knife I lifted from the kitchen, Carol's fucking fingernails or something. Ass-nothing of food, nothing to hold water in. One shitty bedroll, the bike, and the clothes on our backs. A shit-fuck of a situation. Absolute shit-fuck._

They've set themselves up in an abandoned shack several miles from the farm. It's closer to the road than Daryl would like, only a few dozen yards; but with the darkness and the dampness of Carol's breath on his neck, her bony fingers gripping his stomach and the jump of the bike bumping them back and forth against each other, when he sighted the shack he would rather have camped in the middle of the highway then continue riding another moment.

She hasn't looked at him since they sat down; is staring into the fire like she can read her goddamned fortune in it. Or maybe she's talking to her dead daughter, wishing she were here instead of Daryl. Wishing anyone were here instead of him, the way the familiar thrum of his anger is rising, choking him, making his eyes water as he cocks his ear to the black, half expecting to hear a familiar truck or pair of boots pounding through the woods. Half hoping for it. More than half. Anything to get him out of this goddamned shack with this goddamned woman, doesn't have a weapon to her name. At least Beth had taken to carrying a letter opener with her; all the good it would do, it'd be something. Not that she'd have it on her anymore, after what happened. After what she did. After the bed he left her in.

He looks at Carol across the fire and he's pissed and he doesn't know why.

She must feel his eyes on her for she looks at him then, a quizzical look like she's surprised to find him there. It fades into something a bit like contentment and Daryl feels a shiver crawl its way down his spine.

“So what do we do now?” she asks, far louder than he expects her to.

He grunts, then realizes she's expecting an answer.

“Go back to the highway,” he says, “where we left stuff for Sophia.” He sees her eyes cloud over and he doesn't care. “The first place I'd go, if I were Rick. If any of 'em are still alive we'll find them there.”

“You sure that's safe?” she asks. “Aren't there herds wandering the highways?”

“Got the bike, we can outrun anything.”

“Why do we have to go back to them?”

Daryl stares at her, meeting her eyes across the fire.

“Why the fuck wouldn't we?”

“You really think we have a better chance of survival with them than on our own? After what happened?”

“What happened happened.”

“You've been saying since the beginning it was suicide to stay there like that!”

“You thought that, you could'a spoke up when it still made a difference,” Daryl growls, shifting forward to lean on his knees. “Don't matter now. Farm's gone. All that's left is finding our people.”

Carol's staring at him like she's never seen him before. “Since when are they your people?”

“Same time's they became yours.”

“You said yourself the group is broken,” she says, leaning forward herself. “We can't _make it_ with them.”

_Course you will. It's what we do._

Daryl glares at her, levering himself to his feet. “You don't wanna go somewhere reminds you of your kid, get the fuck outta here. Don't need you anymore than you need them.” He ignores her shocked face to grab the steak knife from where he set it and fling it across the fire to land at her feet. “Here. Keep yourself safe. I'll take first watch.”

“You need a knife—“

“I have a fucking knife.”

Daryl stomps to the door of the shack, barely undoing the knots he'd tied around the lock, his hands are shaking so hard. When he steps into the open air he closes the door and inhales deeply, trying to draw the familiar scent of the woods into his lungs.

It smells like death, and his chest feels hollow.

It’s been a night. It’s been a fucking night. Since the moment he woke up in Beth’s bed, he should have known it would end in disaster. The way he felt lying there, waking up to her face, the sheets cocooned around him and the imprint of her skin on his fingertips… no one’s allowed to feel like that without getting made karma’s bitch. Especially a Dixon. He should have fucking known.

Daryl sighs heavily, collapsing onto a shorn tree trunk and rubbing his face harshly. He knew they were fucked as soon as he looked out the window and saw that damn barn. Lit up like a Christmas tree fucking the Fourth of July. The house lights were bad enough. You'd be able to see the barn for miles.

Those miles didn't matter though. Because he'd seen them coming. Hundreds of them. More than he could imagine existing in the world, not that he'd ever thought that hard about it. He had been acutely aware in that moment of how small Beth felt next to him, arm pressed to his as they stared wordlessly at their doom; how fragile her sparrow-like bones were, how thin her skin, how untrained her arms. He knows Shane and Rick had given her some gun training, but whatever she'd learned in a few weeks would be worth nothing on moving targets in the dark. And no matter her tenacity, she didn't have the instincts for hand-to-hand combat; wouldn't know how to anticipate the next lunge, how to shift your weight just right to keep you out of the reach of those jaws. She could have all the weapons in the world and she'd still be defenseless.

So he left her. He put on his boots, slung on his vest, grabbed his bow and left her. Told her to stay put; his only thought, the absurd thought, that if she stayed in her bed she'd be safe. Like a child hiding under the covers from monsters. Except these monsters were real and they overran the house and he told her to stay inside.

He came down to find the household in such a tizzy, no one even noticed where he'd come from. He didn't remind them where Beth was—Beth, suicidal Beth, who for all they knew had just been left alone for hours in a room full of splinters—just charged out the door, hoping against hope he could rev up the bike, draw them away. It didn't take long to realize there were too many—too many walkers, too many moving targets. By that time he'd been cut off from the house; wouldn't have been able to distinguish alive from dead, anyway. It was only Carol's scream and a fortuitous opening in the walkers that got her rescued.

He didn't look back as he drove away into the night. He didn't look back.

 _Someone would have remembered her,_ he thinks, resting his chin on his closed fist. _Or she'd've come down. Ain't the kinda girl to listen to anyone when she's thinking something different._

Despite his rationalizing, he feels a weight on his heart; something like he felt when he lost Merle, but different, more wistful. Not so much like he'd been trapped inside a burning room, but like something on the cusp of opening had slammed shut. Like his rising eyes had been sewed closed halfway.

With another sigh and his forehead tight, Daryl settles in. It's going to be a long night.

* * *

Carol shoots him a look when he shakes her awake at dawn, far past her watch shift, but he ignores her; just stomps back to the squirrel he'd killed as the sun rose. It's barely enough for one of them, let alone both; he figures they can last a day without worrying about food. If they find the group, that will be that; if they don't, he can go on longer trips, think about scavenging. They'll have all the time in the world, then.

Breakfast is quick and quiet, the only noises the crackling fire and Daryl's smacking lips. He can feel Carol's eyes on him throughout, and by the time they're set to leave it's beginning to piss him off again. He's about to swing his leg over the bike when she touches his arm. He turns to her, scowling and impatient.

“What?”

“I just...” She pauses, seems to choose her words carefully. “I won't apologize for what I said last night. I do think we'd be better off alone. But I understand why you don't.”

He waits for more, but that seems to be it. He nods curtly, swinging onto the bike and situating himself, waiting for Carol to secure the bedroll like he showed her. She learns quickly at least, and minutes later they're on the road.

If there's one thing he enjoys about this new world, it's the quiet. The highway is cluttered with cars and debris, but out here, in the backwoods, all around them is forest and sky and the road before them. It reminds him of the fantasies of his childhood: Him and Merle picking the day, stealing a car and roaring up to the house to grab Ma and spirit her away down the endless roads. Going north, maybe, or along the coast; anywhere but Georgia, anywhere but there, anywhere the old man couldn't find them. Of course, she wouldn't have left him even if Daryl'd had the balls; and Merle weren't around often enough to give him the courage. For the rest of his days, he supposes, this is the only road he'll have—open and whispering with the world on fire behind.

He slows down as they approach the highway, cutting the engine as far as he can to keep it quiet. Carol's fingers tense and un-tense against him; he almost snaps at her to relax, but then realizes his hands are doing the same thing against the throttle. His heart in his throat rattles as hard as the engine.

“That's it,” Carol says in his ear as they round the bend in the road. He sees the familiar landscape of cars before him. Nothing seems changed, but their view is so obscured, he doesn't know if he could tell anyway. “You think we should leave the bike, take a look?”

Daryl hesitates, then shakes his head. “Nah. Better to get it over with. Rather be on the bike if we run into trouble than not.”

He feels her nod, and eases them onto the highway.

He knows her eyes will be glued ahead, so he keeps his roaming the detritus around them. Everything seems as they left it; he sees the clothes left on the ground from Lori's rifling, the slash of blood where T-Dog cut his arm. He turns his eyes from the open engines Dale had tried siphoning from, focusing on the cars and their shadowy interiors, the spaces behind.

He feels Carol tense up and his head jerks ahead just as she speaks.

“It's Rick,” she says, in what he would almost call relief.

And it is; striding out through in a gap in the cars to check out the noise, Lori close behind him. As they come closer, he sees Glenn, and T, and Carl, and Daryl’s shoulders slowly start to loosen—when no one else appears, he doesn't let himself keep looking. He doesn't. He focuses on Rick, on the way the crow's feet around his eyes seem to lighten as he catches Daryl's eye. Even so, there's something off with him, something different; an air of weight Daryl had never noticed before.

He doesn't have much time to dwell on it before he's pulled up in front of them. He waits for Carol and then swings himself off the bike, watching as Lori rushes forward to embrace her. He turns to see Rick striding up to him, and without thinking he extends his hand, accepts Rick's warm clasp.

“It's good to see you, Daryl,” he says, voice deep and earnest.

Daryl flushes but manages to keep hold of Rick's hand until the other man lets go. “You too,” he says. He can hear T-Dog greeting Carol behind him, her strangled laughs as he hugs her. Carl's grinning at him toothily and Lori's hand is on his arm and Daryl still isn't looking. “How long've you—“

When he thinks back to the moment, he won't be able to remember exactly what happened, or how he reacted.

What he knows is he is talking to Rick when he sees a flash of yellow out of the corner of his eye before a weight barrels into him, driving the air from his lungs and making him stagger back, arms spread wide.

All he sees is blonde and all he feels is soft curves and tight squeeze and all he smells—it's the smell that wakes him up, makes his nerves begin firing again, the scent of sweat and horses and laundry that sets his heart beating double-time and his lungs groaning. His hands clutch at the air, spasm; he feels her breath on his ear and her weight against him, and in his mind's silence his arms swing around to clasp across her shoulders. He draws her into his body sagged with relief, breathes her in, hears her frantic gasps. Her arms spasm around the back of his neck and he can feel her skin above the collar of his shirt, clutching him like he's the last man on a life-raft. He holds her just as tight, tight until his bones groan, his face buried in her soft damp neck.

“Beth—“

“I was scared, I was so scared,” she whispers.

“It's alright. You're alright, you're alright,” he whispers back, feeling his lips drag across her skin and not caring whether the way she shakes is a shiver or a sob or a laugh; the only thought in his mind, the only picture in his head beyond her smiling face is a door once more open before him.

It's the absolute absence of sound beyond them that finally works its way into his consciousness. He feels his muscles freeze, trapped as if in an iron box as he slowly raises his head.

They're all looking at them. Rick quizzically, Carol and Lori with open shock, Glenn and Carl and T-Dog like they think they're dreaming. In the distance he sees Maggie and Hershel step out of a truck where they must have been napping. He meets Maggie's eyes; sees the way they slide across his arms, the bars they make across her sister's back. How heavy they are on her skin.

Daryl unclasps his hands from Beth's shoulders, pulling away jerkily. She squeezes him once more before letting go. His heart spasms a little at her look of teary relief, the open joy she bears—he clears his throat and steps back, averting his gaze. He sees her confused frown begin to form out of the corner of his eye and it makes his chest ache.

“Daryl?”

He only mumbles, then turns and strides back to the bike, covering the shaking in his hands by drawing out his red rag, running it briskly across the chrome. Voices slowly begin to return behind him—not hers, though. Not that he's listening for it

He waits until the footsteps begin to recede, the voices fade, before wiping his damp eyes on his sleeve.

* * *

He pretends she wouldn't come to him. That what he did this afternoon, her family's presence, the cold of the open air, would be enough to keep her away.

Even as he thinks it, he knows he's fooling himself. He knows her better than that. She knows him better.

He hears the swoosh of her blanket on the ground before he hears her footsteps, light as they are. He takes a moment to feel impressed at her quiet; his wince as she steps on a twig shatters it a bit, but grudging admiration remains.

Maybe it's just her, he thinks, the way she is; quiet, waiting in corners until she's needed, making light in the shadows.

She stops in front of where he sits and he knows he's fucked.

“Go back to sleep, Beth,” he growls, as menacingly as he can.

“No,” she says.

He closes his eyes, grinds his teeth. “Greene—“

“Better open your eyes. You're on guard duty. Don't want anyone to think you're doing something _wrong_.”

His eyes do snap open, then, and land on her. He can hardly see her against the shadows of the forest, especially with how backlit she is by the low fire. But he can imagine her expression—pissy and stubborn as a mule, glaring down at him with flint in her eyes.

“Best watch yourself, girl,” he says softly.

“Or what? You'll clean your bike some more? Pretty sure it's cleaner than it's been since it was new.”

Daryl fights the flush building on his neck, glad of the dark for hiding it. He doesn't know what to say to her.

“Fine,” he grinds out, looking back ahead. “Fucking sit. Do what the hell you want.”

She pauses, as if waiting for him to say more, then drops down to her bottom, shifting a little to pull the blanket out from under her and fold it tighter across her shoulders. Daryl looks at her out of the corner of his eye. Someone's dug up a jean jacket for her, but beneath it is still her thin tank top and pajama bottoms. The blanket is thin, moth eaten, and he can see her shaking.

Daryl sighs harshly and puts his bow by his feet, pulling off his vest. “Here,” he says, handing it over without looking at her. “Ain't much, but...”

She doesn't say anything for many long moments. Against his will he turns his head. She's watching him with some indescribable look—wary and surprised and still deeply hurt, and God if that last doesn't burn him—and she waits several more moments before reaching out and taking the vest, reaching daintily, careful not to brush his fingers. She throws off the blanket to pull the vest on with a shiver. He just resists reaching over to help tuck the blanket back around her shoulders.

“Thanks,” she says shortly, folding in on herself. She doesn't look much warmer, but it makes Daryl feel better, at least.

It takes a few long minutes of silence for him to get twitchy. He can't remember the last time he's been the one to break an uncomfortable silence.

“Got anything to say?” he asks.

He feels her eyes on him again, but he doesn't look.

“I thought you would,” she says quietly.

He shrugs, peering at the sky. “Don't tend to say much.”

“You do,” she says. “To me, you do.”

Daryl stays silent, glaring into the trees, looking anywhere but at her, bunched up and freezing at his side.

“You could say, for example, where the hell you went last night.”

Daryl's shoulders tense, but he makes no reply.

“You told me to wait upstairs and you never came back. Then I see you on the highway, and I'm so,” her voice cracks, and Daryl squeezes his eyes shut, teeth bared, “It's so long since I've been that happy. Then you shove me away like you want nothing to do with me?”

“What the fuck you expect from me?”

“I _expect_ you to stop pretending you don't give a crap about me.”

“Who said I do?” Daryl mutters.

“ _You_ did,” Beth says boldly. Daryl does look at her, now; sees her neck arched, fire and brimstone in her eyes, hair in wild tangles around her head. “Last night. Here. You hugged me back Daryl. Before all this _bullshit_ you hugged me back.”

“Was a mistake. Was a mistake you doing that in the first place.”

“I thought you were dead!” Beth all but yells; Daryl throws a panicked look towards the group, and Beth lowers her voice, but only just. “I saw you ride off on that damn motorcycle right into the middle of them and I thought...” To Daryl's horror, he sees tears begin to form in her eyes before she turns away, wiping them angrily on the blanket. “You don't get to do this to me,” she says, low. “You don't get to treat me like I matter one minute and like dirt the next. You don’t do that to people who care about you.”

“No one fucking cares about me.”

He feels her shocked gaze on him, but he doesn't look; lets it burn into his neck like a cigarette.

“That's not true,” she says, low.

“The fuck you know? You're just a kid.”

He can feel her bristle beside him.

“Least I'm not a fucking _coward_.”

It's the unexpected curse more than the meaning that has Daryl looking at her, and he immediately regrets it. Staring at him with those big blue eyes, shaded by the dark but no less violent. Her lips are pulled into a thin angry line, and her eyes shimmer with unshed liquid. Daryl pulls his shoulders in, rolls his wrists, fights to hold her gaze.

“You think people don't care cause you push them away before they get the chance. And now you got someone who does, who isn't afraid to say she does, and you're running away from that? Why're you so scared of meaning something to someone?” Daryl turns his head away, but then she's there, grabbing his forearm and wrenching him around. She lets go immediately, looking almost surprised at herself, but it doesn't lessen the conviction in her eyes. “You better get used to me caring, Daryl. Cause I need you. Everyone here needs you.”

“No one needs me,” he says, avoiding the first part of what she said, where the real denial lies—he isn’t ready to even look at that. “That's bullshit.”

“It's not.” She leans in close again, grabs his forearm. He can feel her small fingers digging into his bicep, setting the nerves on fire.

“We all need you,” she says, soft. “But I _want_ you. And I think you want me too. And I think that scares you to death.”

Daryl yanks his arm away, turns towards the woods. “I ain't a little girl. I ain't scared of nothing.”

This time when she grabs his arm, it's violent and fierce, her hand like claws. She turns him around and drags him in until he's close enough he can feel her breath on his face, hot and angry. He looks into her eyes and feels his insides burn.

“I was there yesterday too, you know,” Beth says quietly. “You said you wouldn't leave me. What the hell are you doing now?”

They sit there for a few moments, breathing heavily. Daryl suddenly realizes how loud they're being, how all it would take would be a few moments of wakefulness from the group and they'd be found out. But what would be found? He's where he's supposed to be. It's the girl following him, harassing him. Got a goddamn teenybopper crush, that's what they'll think. Makes sense. Good girl and bad boy, angel and the asshole. Trying to seduce him, get him to give her attention, validate whatever self-esteem fuckery she's got going on in that soft golden head. They wouldn't blame him at all.

_That's not it, Dixon. You know it isn't._

And it isn't. Because he was there yesterday. He lay in her bed and he held her. She cried into his chest until her tears flowed like rivers and he didn't let go. She cleaned his hands and soothed his scars and looked at him like he was worth something, like somewhere in her pure little heart there was a space marked Daryl Dixon and she knew she'd find one for Beth Greene in his. And Maggie might look at him, Hershel might look at him like a monster for corrupting their girl but he knows, he knows it's her corrupting him, crawling under his skin like so many snakes, tangling with his tendons and bones until they grow like trees around each other. When her arms came around him—when he felt her body alive and warm and _with_ him—it was like finding he's lived his 35 years not really awake until this day, with this girl, with her limbs stretched like stents to fill the breaches inside him.

They might not blame him. But she would. Because he told her he'd stay.

Her grip on his arm has lessened but she's still looking at him, still searching like she knows there's something to find. And Daryl is so tired of fighting.

“You don't need to do this alone, Daryl,” she says softly. “I’m not leaving _you_ either.”

He's quiet for several minutes, staring at her hand on his arm. Her grip has loosed into more of a touch than a hold; not moving, but there; a reminder.

“Carol wanted to leave the group,” Daryl says gruffly.

Beth's hand jerks in confusion.

“What?”

“Didn't want to come back to the highway. Think she didn't want nothing to do with anything reminds her of her kid.” Daryl picks at a thread on his jeans. “Dunno why she'd wanna stay with me, then,” he says quietly.

“I told you. You're important.”

Daryl does nothing but shrug. He knows what she'll keep saying.

He's worried that if she says it enough, he might start believing it.

“Why'd you come back then?”

And Daryl looks at her. At her wide eyes, dark blue like the view of the deepening sky from a mountain. At her soft mouth, parted in concern, the flash of her teeth behind. At the soft curve of her cheek, the perfect size for his palm.

He remembers how it felt to have a warm body pressed against his own. He remembers how she trusted him with her stomach in his grip. He remembers her hair, oiled and sweaty and fragrant of her, pressed to his face and filling him up, filling them up, with a something he in his 35 years has never known. A peace. A quiet. A hand in gentleness on his face.

And Daryl looks at her. And he sees her face open in understanding.

“Oh,” she says.

Daryl finds he can't hold her gaze anymore, sharp as it is. He closes his eyes. His shoulders collapse and he hangs his head.

Her forehead is there in a moment, pressed to his. He opens his eyes and hers are watching him, still.

“Why you doing this, Beth?”

“I told you,” she says. He can feel her breath on his face. “I need you. I want you. Isn't that enough?”

Daryl snorts softly, and closes his eyes again.

Her lips are feather soft on his cheek; little more than the brush of a leaf across his skin, but he feels it; feels the way her hand slides across his jaw as she pulls away. Daryl's eyes stay closed, lost in the haze of her touch and her smell.

By the time Daryl's mind catches up to her actions he has to lunge a bit to grab at her blanket. She stops, looks back at him quizzically. He blushes, but doesn't let go of the blanket.

“Hey, you, uh. You don't have'ta go to bed yet. If you don't want.”

Beth looks down at him, face inscrutable in the dim.

“I'm cold,” she says quietly.

Daryl hesitates, then lets go of the blanket, lifting his arm and gesturing awkwardly. “C'mere, then.”

She smiles, then—even through the dark, he knows she does—and steps back towards him. As they work to fit together Daryl feels a desperate churning anxiety in his gut; but once they're settled—her pressed into his side, his arm across her shoulders, drawing her close as she pulls the blanket together across her front—well. Well.

“What do we do now?” she asks, wiggling until her shoulder doesn't poke him in the side.

Daryl leans his head back against the wall, scanning the dark. “Food. Blankets, shelter, water. Keep moving till we find a place we can stay.”

“Somewhere for Lori to have the baby?”

“Yeah.” Daryl worries his lip with his teeth. “Needs to be somewhere secure, with walls. Can't let what happened to the farm happen again.” He pauses, realizing he probably shouldn't have said that—but she doesn't react, not even in the speed of her breathing. He glances down at her and sees her watching the dark, same as him. She seems lost in thought.

All of a sudden, she snorts. Daryl nearly jumps. “What?” he asks.

“Nothin', just... it isn't funny.” He stays silent, watching her. She feels his gaze, glances up at him, and shrugs. “Just thinking... guess I don't have to worry about having sex with Jimmy anymore.”

Daryl's heart squeezes like it's been lassoed. Rick had told him what happened to the RV, to Jimmy inside. He might not have respected the kid, but Beth liked him. Loved him, maybe. And Daryl realizes that she's lost a barn full of people, her boyfriend, and her lifelong home, all in a few days. It's been less than 72 hours since she tried to kill herself. She could still be weak from blood-loss, and just minutes ago he was here, abusing her.

Daryl feels sick.

She mistakes his silence for annoyance, and sighs. “Sorry. I know you didn't like him. And maybe I didn't either sometimes, but... I dunno. I dunno what to feel.”

“Don't have'ta feel anything,” Daryl says. “Ain't no one thing.”

“I'd only lost my Granny before,” Beth says. “My other three grandparents died before I was born, and hers was the only funeral I'd ever been to. I'd read stuff about mourning in books, and one year this kid in my high school died, and everyone was sad and grieving but... it wasn't personal, you know? I was so sad for him, for his family, but I could go home and forget about it. And now...” Daryl looks down at her, staring vacantly into the dark. “Andrea says you have to make room for it,” Beth says softly. “But what happens to everything you gotta push aside? How do you carry all of it without losing parts of yourself?”

Daryl shrugs, resituating his grip on her shoulder. “Never loved no one but Merle and my mama,” he says. He feels Beth looking at him and he turns away. “Lost people, plenty of people, but I never loved none of them. So I dunno bout any of it.”

“You don't need to have things first to lose them,” Beth says. She reaches across his body to take the hand resting on his knee. He twines his fingers with hers. “Before I... tried, Maggie told me she couldn't take another funeral. Said it like she was trying to guilt me, like me wanting to leave this world was a personal slight on her.” Daryl scowls, but Beth is still talking. “I said we couldn't avoid more of them. And we can't. Couldn't in the real world either, but at least then we had time. Or the illusion of it. Now, it's like... time is dead. Like the world itself is dying. And there's nothing we can do to stop it.” Beth drags in a deep breath. She's rubbing her wrist against her jeans, almost absentmindedly. Daryl feels his heart begin to pound.

“You ain't—“

“I'm not going to try again,” Beth says, glancing at him. She sees the concern on his face and smiles. “Even if I didn't have you, or Maggie, or Daddy, I wouldn't. Cause if everything outside of us is dead, all we can do is keep that little bit left alive.” She raises their joined hands and presses their knuckles to Daryl's chest. “Here.” He swallows. She's still smiling. “I could do it without you. But you make it easier.”

“Good,” Daryl says, low, his head spinning.

“Yeah,” Beth says. She shifts against him. “I don't really know what I'm saying, just... can you remind me, sometimes? That that's something I believe? I don't want it to be one of the things that gets pushed out.”

“You trust me with that?”

“Yeah, Daryl. I do.” Beth lowers their hands to his knee again. “Anything you need reminding of?”

Daryl's silent for a long time. Then he says, haltingly, “What you said before. Bout losing things without having them. I wanna remember that. Cause... means there ain't no excuse not to have things. If you gotta lose it anyway, might as well have it first, right? Ya think?”

He can't see her smile, where it's pressed to his arm, but he can feel it. “Yeah,” she says. “I do.”

“Yeah.” Daryl shifts, sniffing softly. He looks at the top of her head. “What happened to Patricia, anyway?”

Beth does stiffen this time, and Daryl mentally berates himself. She saw it, whatever it was. And it wasn't pretty.

“You don't have'ta answer,” he says softly.

“Thanks.” Beth looks up at him, meeting his eyes in the gloom. “I'm glad you're with me, Daryl Dixon.”

Daryl ignores the way his heart races, the way his chest suddenly seems too tight for breath. He ignores the way her hand pulses around his. He ignores the warmth of her breath on his neck. All he pays attention to are her eyes, large and blue, swallowing him down like the deepest slumber, the most welcome noose.

“I'm glad you're with me too, Beth.”

A small drizzle has started, and with Beth's help Daryl spreads her moth-eaten blanket over them. It doesn't give them great cover, but it's something. The rain dribbles down through the holes. The wind buffets their cheeks. Beth closes her eyes as Daryl squints through the damp, ears cocked to the trees, listening. The night is chill; even the squirrels have stopped chattering, the owls stopped hooting. He hears Glenn's soft snores behind them; he hears Beth's quiet breaths. The night is cool and the air is soft and she leans her cheek on his shoulder and her hand on his knee and neither of them are cold anymore.


	9. The Day I Wandered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The cars have broken down, the group makes its way slowly across the countryside, and since when has Daryl been involved with so many confusing women?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first half of this chapter is completely Mary's influence. Thanks to her as always <3

It's only noon, and it feels like they've been walking for days since they woke. His feet ache, his back is sore, he knows there's at least one blister building on his toes. In short, Daryl Dixon is miserable.

He can only imagine how the rest of them feel.

It's been three days since the truck broke down, two since the sedan, and they've been trudging along since dawn. They've been taking turns wheeling the bike; Rick and Glenn have it now, at the head of the group, with Carl dozing on top. The kid's been having nightmares, barely sleeps at night. None of them have been sleeping so well, since the farm.

At least for Daryl, it's for a good reason. It went unspoken that he would take the first guard duty every night; he, Beth, and Carl were the only ones left off the roster. He heard an earful from her when that was decided, and he definitely agrees with her; he understands Carl as too young, but there's no point wasting an able body when they have so few to begin with. Doesn't much matter though, cause she spends every night on watch anyway; leaning against the tree beside him or curled into his side on the ground, talking sometimes, sometimes not, sometimes just watching the trees sway and listening for stirring in the forest. They haven't found a house yet they've felt safe staying in, so it's been every night in a campsite, which is risky in terms of sneaking her in and out of her blankets; but if he's honest with himself, he wouldn't think of asking her to stop, and she'd give him a tongue lashing if he did. Girl has a way of getting her way, he realizes. At least with him.

He tries not to think too much, about what that means. That he's so amenable to her, that he wants her presence, that even as they walk spread out across the road in their column he knows exactly how far behind him she is, how long it would take to get to her, if something goes wrong. And he won't let it go wrong.

And it's not just her. He didn't realize it was happening at the farm; took a few days on the road before it crept up on him. But he knows now: He doesn't want anyone to die. Not any of them. Not again. He looks across the group and he feels a twinge in his chest at each face, a little knot inside of him that would come undone if they were lost. He's never felt this before, not for no one but his mama, Merle; maybe when that last one unraveled it made room for more to take its place.

It's a strange feeling, caring about people. Making sure they have enough food and water, that they rest enough, the way he did for his mama when he was little. Like things are coming full circle, almost. Like he's worth something, cause there are people he would die for. And he knows that if it were a choice between himself and one of them, nine times out of 10 he'd pick them.

A few are 10 out of 10. Rick. Carl. Beth. Beth. Beth.

He feels Lori might be creeping up there now, too. She's had the hardest time of it, at least of any of them that aren't Greenes. Ain't easy to lose your safety, your lover, and your husband all in one night. Especially not when she's got a baby coming with only a veterinarian to deliver it.

She'd always been suspicious of him before, but somehow he feels that's changing. Maybe it's all that stuff Beth talks to him about, stuff he listens to; the way she tries to be a good person, how her daddy taught her that a kind word at the right time can save someone's life. And Daryl isn't too good at words, but lives, he hopes, he can do; and he thinks saving Carol might have tipped the balance in that. Maybe she noticed the way he saw Carl asleep on his feet and hoisted him up on the bike. Maybe she's just tired of carrying around old tensions. He knows how that feels.

He's walking beside her now, a few yards behind Rick, Glenn, and Carl. They've been in this position for a while, in silence; it's what Daryl prefers, and Lori doesn't seem to have any objections to it. She seems preoccupied, anyway; staring at Rick, rubbing her stomach, adjusting the pack on her thin shoulders; must be killing her when his own are already aching.

“Want me to take that?” he asks as she's been fiddling with the weight for a few minutes.

She looks up in surprise, meeting his eyes for a moment before his slide away to scan the forest.

“No, I'm fine,” she says. “No worse off than anyone else.”

“Don't wanna strain yourself.”

Lori looks at him out of the corner of her eye. She almost looks amused. “You're starting to sound like Hershel.”

“Man talks sense,” Daryl says.

She looks at him a few more moments, then snorts softly, shaking her head.

“What?” Daryl asks.

Lori sighs, adjusting her pack again. “I always expected it to be Rick asking that question,” she says. “He was like that before Carl was born. Overly-attentive. Sometimes I'd have to go on long drives by myself just to breathe. One time I forgot to charge my phone and stayed out past dark. When I got back he was frantic. He said he almost put out an Amber Alert.” She looks towards the motorcycle and the man pushing it, as if her eyes are drawn there. “Shane was there, of course. He always called Shane before anyone else. If the house burned down I wouldn't be surprised if Shane beat the firetrucks.” She looks at the ground, watching her feet stamp through the dirt. “Now look at us.”

Daryl feels a strange twinge, looking at Lori. With her gaunt cheeks, haunted eyes, she reminds him of too many people. Hookers off their beat, smoking in bars and watching the world roll past. Single mamas strung out on dope, giving him a buck to make sure their kids don't get their heads stuck in the toilet. His mama, bloodied and bruised on her knees, begging his daddy to love her. Like all of them, she's a proud woman taken a few too many hits to the gut. And now there's something in that gut worth protecting, needs standing up for; and here's Rick, making her do it all on her own.

She can do it; if he's learned anything about women in his 35 years, he knows she can do it.

Don't make it right, though.

“I'll talk to him,” Daryl says. Lori looks up. She didn't expect him to speak. “He ain't thinking straight right now. This ain't him.”

“He's what I made him. I pushed him to it.”

“Bullshit,” Daryl says. His cheeks are hot with Lori's eyes on him, but he still continues. “Shane's the one pushed him. Weren't about protecting the group, neither, never was. Asshole'd been thinking with his dick since Rick got back.”

There are a few moments of silence and he glances at her. The small smile on her face almost makes him fall over.

“What?” he asks.

“My mother always told me that's how all men think. You're telling me you and Rick are exceptions?”

Part of Daryl is aware she's teasing him (and when the fuck Lori Grimes became the type of woman to tease a man like him, he'll never know); but it doesn't stop the rest of him from flashing white hot and ice cold, to think about the girl at the rear of the column, several steps behind her sister and their daddy. Think about the thud of his embarrassed arousal beneath their shared blankets. The way her bare stomach felt against his palm. The weight of her warmth all snuggled up to him at night, every night, following him like clockwork, like she's paid to do it. How noticing her that way now makes him realize all the times he'd noticed before he knew what it meant; when it wasn't the breeze stirring his cock as he observed her crossing the pasture in her tight jeans, when he caught sight of small white panties on the laundry line and felt the urgent need to be elsewhere. Daryl Dixon isn't a man who's felt much lust in his life, and he's never felt anything like he feels for Beth Greene.

But it's there. It's part of it. It just took a while to recognize because both feelings were so unfamiliar.

_You're telling me you and Rick are exceptions?_

“No,” he says, squeezing the strap of his crossbow till his knuckles go white. He looks off into the forest, ignoring Lori's eyes on his flushed neck. Just stops himself from looking back, catching sight of the girl. It's been too long since he's looked at her, he thinks; like it's a right he's amassed, a piece of the way he's making her his property, screwing her up little by little without even realizing he's doing it.

Is that what he's doing? Is that what those nights beyond the fire's warmth mean? He doesn't know himself well enough to know the answer.

She might know. Of all people she might. But then she's probably deluded herself about him too.

“Daryl?”

He looks back at Lori and she looks concerned. Concerned for him. Hell.

“I'll talk to him,” Daryl repeats, gruff.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” she says. “For now. But thank you.”

She’s still looking him over. Still too astute. Still too many people. And yet Daryl isn't quite at the point of running.

He wonders if that's Beth's doing. If the way she stands up to him made him wonder about standing up to himself. And the twinge he feels is not in his cock as he recalls her hands clutching his, her face upturned in the dim.

“You got out with Beth, right?”

He didn't expect himself to actually go through with saying it, and he doesn't let himself look at Lori in the silence that follows.

“Yes,” Lori says. “Patricia got her down from her room.”

“What happened to Patricia?” Daryl asks.

More silence. His flight response is winding tighter and tighter.

“I was running ahead of them and I heard them scream. A pair of walkers had jumped them from behind a tree, and more and more were coming. Beth was holding her hand and she wouldn't let go.” Daryl can't help glancing at Lori; she has her hand over her stomach again. “I had to drag Beth away from her. She was watching her friend get torn apart in front of her eyes and she wouldn't let go.”

 _That's Beth,_ Daryl thinks.

But Lori isn't done.

“Be kind to her, ok?” she says, meeting Daryl's eyes. “I know you don't like her, but she's just a kid. The poor girl's been through a lot, she doesn't need you being all... gruff.” Lori smiles a little, oblivious to Daryl's rapidly blinking eyes. “It was good how you humored her on the highway. Lord knows she needs some kindness if she's going to be strong enough to survive this. If she gets to be too much, just come to me, ok?”

Daryl wants to laugh. He wants to laugh, he wants to burst out laughing, he wants to double over and guffaw until tears stream from his eyes. He doesn't think anyone has so misread a situation since the time his dad sweet-talked the child services people.

He sobers quickly, though. Because yes, Lori is wrong. About so many things, but none more so than the thought that Beth needs coddling in order to be strong. In Daryl's experience it's been the exact opposite. But it makes him think about what she's gone through. About seeing her long-dead mother shot in the head; the woman who came closest to being a mother after that ripped apart in her arms. He thinks about the girl who saw those things and the girl who sits in his arms every night and he feels an absurd blush of pride rush through him.

“Daryl?”

Daryl's head jerks up, and he realizes Lori expected a response. He clears his throat, avoiding her quizzical look.

“Yeah,” he grunts, “Yeah, uh, I'll go easy on her.”

“Thank you,” Lori says. She's still regarding him. He shifts his shoulders under her scrutiny. “You've come a long way, Daryl,” she says.

He squints at her, fist working on his crossbow strap. “The fuck's that mean?”

She shrugs, wincing a little when it aggravates her sore shoulders. “Figure that a few weeks ago, you would have laughed in my face, or yelled at me, I asked you to be nice to Beth.” She pauses, and when Daryl glances at her he's surprised to find she looks embarrassed. “I thought you were like your brother for a long time, and I distrusted you for it.” She tilts her head, meeting his gaze. “I'm glad I was wrong.”

“Yeah, well,” Daryl mumbles, “No one's Merle 'cept Merle.”

Lori chuckles a little. “I suppose that's true.” She looks at him again, then reaches out; Daryl fights not to flinch as she rests a hand on his arm. “Thank you,” she says, speaking more sincerely than Daryl thinks he's ever been spoken to, save by Beth. “I feel safer, knowing you're with us.” Daryl blinks at her until she removes her hand, sighing and rolling her shoulders. “God, do I miss Miss Coco's,” she mutters. She glances at Daryl, says, “Massage parlor.”

“Figured,” Daryl mutters. They walk a few more moments in silence, then Daryl jerks his thumb behind them, saying, “I'm gonna...”

“Yeah, of course,” Lori says. She gives him a smile; an actual, genuine smile. “It's been good talking to you.”

“You too,” Daryl mutters. He gives her a nod, short, jerky, and lets himself fall behind.

* * *

He knows he should be paying attention to their surroundings; that of all the group, he's the most likely to spot trouble before the rest of them, and after a few times hustling them off the road and out of view of passing herds, it's an ability the others have begun to take for granted, no matter how watchful they remain.

But as he meanders backwards through the group—ending up by T-Dog who regales him with a story of one older lady in his congregation who claimed she'd been Madonna's lover for a while—he can't help but drift. Can't help but dwell on what kind of fucked up world this is, got a woman like Lori Grimes trusting a man like him.

He thinks of those women—noses upturned in their mammoth minivans, driving their kids to and from school, spending their husbands' money on _massage parlors_ and fancy linen, taking their strollers across the street, they see him and Merle on the horizon.

It's no surprise that Lori didn't like Merle; no one ever _liked_ Merle, an achievement the elder Dixon was damn proud of. It made him laugh, seeing the fear in those women's eyes. Not because he got off on it, or did anything serious to provoke it, beside some lewd remarks. He laughed because of how wrong they were; how they scorned men like him while secretly desiring them, what they represented, everything their proper, bread-winning husbands weren't. Merle left most of them alone, but he had an eye for those who were willing to embrace their fear; Daryl can't remember the number of times he came home to find a Jones New York coat thrown across the back of their shitty sofa, or woken up to a woman with chemically-treated hair tip-toeing past him in her pantyhose.

Those were the women who felt trapped by their lives, who needed a bit of rough on the side to take the edge off, make the rest of living more bearable. He doesn't think Lori's the type to have gone with Merle, even if she met him in a situation like now, with her son and husband hating her—but then, what does he know? He never thought Beth would go for an asshole like him either.

And doesn't that make his skin itch, thinking again, as he does so often these days, what exactly the two of them are “going for.” What the endgame is of all these nights spent curled around each other, taking comfort from the simple pleasure of warm limbs, two streams of mist puffing from their mouths into the chilled air. It bothers him; not just the not knowing, but the fact that he cares. He's never really thought about the future before. He always had people to do that for him: his pop shrinking his world into a journey from beating to beating, Merle laying out their plans as they moved from town to town, schemed their schemes, kept Daryl with him in that nomadic life like he didn't want be alone on a raft drifting farther from shore.

But Pop's been gone a long time, and Merle's been gone long enough.

Beth, though. Beth's here. Beth's here, and for once he has a choice whether or not to keep her there.

Not that it's much of a choice.

T-Dog finally talks himself out, and Daryl leaves him chuckling to himself, surrounded by his friendly phantoms, a kind of ghost that Daryl can't fathom. Daryl drifts backwards—nods at Hershel and Maggie as he passes, mutters about watching their rear—and finally reaches Beth.

She looks at least as exhausted as Lori does, if not more so—Lori might be pregnant, but Beth never really got a chance to heal from her attempt to kill herself, physically or emotionally, and Daryl sees it in her face, sometimes, when she thinks he isn't looking, how part of her wishes she'd stayed in that bed. He knows a little more of why, now, after talking to Lori, and when Beth turns her tired yet bright eyes on him he imagines he sees something of her ghosts too.

“Hey there,” she says—upbeat, for his benefit, and it still amazes him that there's someone doing anything for his benefit—nudging him with her arm as they fall into step. Daryl presses back into it a bit, taking a moment to pretend they aren't in a column of people who think they've barely spoken, who would look askance should they learn that isn't the case. Daryl tries not to think about the potential fallout from that; especially not in moments like these, when she's walking close beside him, ponytail coming undone and sweat beading on her forehead, brightening her tired eyes so he isn't burdened with worry.

She must know she isn't successful, the way he's looking at her; slowly her shoulders slacken again, and her eyebrows lower. But there is still a sense of lightness about her that wasn't there when he first joined her; and the possibility that it's his presence that does that leaves his knees a little weak.

“Hey,” he says, looking her carefully up and down. “You doing ok?”

“Yeah,” she says. Daryl raises his eyebrows. She rolls her eyes. “I _am_ , ok? Don't give me that look, Dixon.”

“I'll look at you any way I wanna look at you,” he teases; deadpan, from the corner of his mouth and without a change of expression, but as always, she understands, nudging him again.

“Meanie,” she says, beaming. It feels genuine this time, and the brightness of it leaves Daryl feeling a little tongue tied.

They walk in silence for several minutes, hands brushing occasionally and neither doing anything to stop it. Daryl makes a pretense of watching the woods, but as before, he's distracted, looking just as often at the girl at his side.

As usual, she's the one to break the silence.

“You know how much longer till dark?”

Daryl squints up at the sun, tilting his head. “Couple'a hours, maybe.” He glances at her, then jerks his head at the sky. “You can tell by how high up the sun is. If you know how long the day is, you can count up with your fists, figure it out. Ain't hard.” He nods to himself, then looks back at Beth. He's surprised to find her smiling. “What?”

“Thanks for telling me that,” she says.

Her voice is surprisingly soft. Daryl frowns, squinting at her; she pulls her lips into her mouth and looks away.

“You sure you're ok, girl?”

“Yeah,” she says, not looking at him, “I said it, didn't I?”

“I got eyes, Beth,” he says dryly. When she still doesn't look at him, he reaches out a hand to touch her shoulder. It's barely a tap, more of a brush, really, but she feels it, looking back at him. Her lips are still twisted, but he can tell from her eyes that she's done pretending.

She shrugs, using the motion to help adjust her pack. “Just tired, I guess.”

“You ought'a get more sleep, then; spend less time gabbing.”

Even without the smirk on his face, they'd both know he doesn't mean it. That transparency makes her smile, at least. She shakes her head, sighing.

“I just feel... I feel like we've been lucky, you know? I mean, beside losing the farm and all.” She looks down at her feet, watching the dust clouds they kick up. “We haven't run smack dab into any herds, haven't seen any people. All this feels hard, cause we aren't used to it, but... I don't know. We've just been real lucky.”

Daryl cocks his head, studying her profile. “That's a bad thing?”

“Of course not,” Beth says, looking at him. She holds his gaze a moment, then sighs, looking ahead. “I guess I just feel... uncertain. About what I'll do when we aren't so lucky.”

“Ain't nothing to think about doing. You'll just, iunno, do it.”

“I don't know,” Beth says, soft. “I guess I just... don't really know why I'm still here.”

Daryl's shoulders tense up, and he's sure she can feel his sharp gaze on her face; she glances at him, then back down, cheeks pinking.

“That first night; you asked what happened to Patricia—“

“Lori told me,” Daryl says. “That you saw it.”

“I felt it,” Beth says quietly. “I felt every—at first I was confused why she stopped. Thought maybe she'd seen one of the barn cats, needing rescuing. But then I looked back and saw... pieces of her, just, _gone_ , and it was like... like I wasn't me anymore. Like I was in her body holding my hand and screaming and screaming...” Beth trails off. Daryl's hand twitches, he wants to reach for her so bad. “Lori pulled me away, and I remembered who I was, and ran, but... I can't stop thinking about it. That if we'd been just a second slower, or the walkers a second faster, it would have been me. It was just luck, there wasn't any reason for it.”

“Dying don't need a reason,” Daryl says.

“I know, I know, I just...” Beth blows out a harsh breath, scrubs at her face. “I just think... I know I chose to live. When I was in the bathroom, and saw all that blood and realized that I didn't want to go, not like that... I made my choice then. But, I dunno.” She glances at him, then back at the ground. “I don't think I should be here. I can't stop thinking that if those walkers had been faster, or we'd been slower, I wouldn't be. There's nothing I could have done to stop it. I don't know enough, I'm not strong enough, I'm just weak—“

Daryl's hand shoots out to grab her forearm; not hard enough to bruise, but strong enough to show he could, and she gives a little gasp as he jerks her towards him, pulling them both to a stop as she thumps against his chest. He keeps hold of her arm and leans forward, gaze fixed on her eyes.

They're closer than they've been since they lay in her bed together, but he isn't thinking about that right now.

“You think Shane was weak?”

Beth's brows furrow, and she tugs her arm a bit in confusion. “Huh?”

“You heard me. You think Shane was weak? Andrea?” Beth still looks confused, and Daryl tightens his hold on her arm, shaking a bit. “C'mon, Greene.”

“No,” she says. “They weren't weak, they just—“

“Then why'd they die?”

“I don't...” She shakes her head, frowning. “What does this have to do with—“

“You think you should'a died back there with them, huh?” Daryl asks, a bit of anger bleeding into his voice. “You think you ain't strong enough to be here?”

“Just sometimes,” she whispers.

“You know why they died, all them people?” he asks. His voice is softer, but no less forceful. “You know why? It's like you said. It's luck, it's all fucking luck. You keep thinking like it ain't, like it's the same as it was before—that's when you're fucked. Cause weak and strong don't mean nothing anymore—there's alive, and there's dead, and I'm gonna keep you alive if it fucking kills me.” Daryl swallows. “It don't matter why they ain't here, girl—you _are._ ” She's staring at him. His eyes prickle. He shakes her arm again. “So stop thinking that way right the fuck now, Greene. Before I whup your ass.”

It's only when he stops talking that he realizes he's panting. They both are, chests rising and falling against each other's; even through their layers of clothing he can feel her heart going like a bird's, no pause between the beats. He thinks his might be doing the same, the way his head suddenly feels like it's floating, the way all of a sudden he _feels_ —feels the desperation of making her understand, of showing her; doesn't she _see_ the way the words 'weak' and 'Beth Greene' don't exist on the same plane, in the same dictionary; that the only time they were even aware of each other was when she took him into her arms and all he wanted was to sink to his knees and weep like a child that she hadn't left him alone again. He feels that need, and another kind of need—the need to make her stop staring at him, with those eyes so huge he feels ready to fall into them; the need to pull her closer, to feel her, to _tell_ her in ways his words never could just how alive she is—and the urge comes over him so suddenly that if she weren't pressed into him he would fall.

And she's still staring, mouth fallen open, heart-beat fluttering and nipples hard against him as she finds everything he said writ bold in his eyes.

“Beth?”

It's like there was some electric current running between them that at this moment decides to snap, and Daryl jerks back, looking—and it's the highway all over again. Because they must have noticed at some point that Beth and Daryl had stopped, must have wondered where their foot beats went—and now the whole column is halted, staring at them. Except this time, Hershel and Maggie are the closest. He can't read the look on the old man's face, but Maggie looks like she's building towards fury.

Daryl realizes, then, how tightly he's holding Beth's arm—how Maggie can see her flesh bulging up around his grip, how large he looks hovering over her—and he lets her go, stepping away and re-situating his crossbow on his shoulder, clearing his throat. Beth is still staring at him, but her mouth has closed. She licks her lips; just a small dart of tongue, there then gone.

It's exactly like the highway, but it's so different—because this time Daryl's the one who's surprised her. He doesn't know what part of it, exactly, was surprising—maybe just the sense he's felt building for weeks: the sensation of being seen.

“Don't forget that, girl,” he says. His voice is hoarse, like he'd been shouting instead of speaking in a near whisper.

“I won't,” she says softly.

Daryl nods once, jerky, before looking back at the group. They're still staring at him. Maggie brushes past him as she goes to Beth, puts an arm around her shoulders.

“We going or what?” he snaps.

Slowly, they do; one by one, their eyes slide away from him; they reform the column and they move on. Daryl doesn't walk with anyone, this time—feels like none of them would take him, after what they saw.

But again, unlike the highway, he finds it doesn't matter. None of it does.

Because she is five steps away from him— four steps behind and three to the right. There are no walkers in the woods; the air is clear, and it will not storm tonight. She is talking to her sister in low tones. She is tired, but she is walking.

And her eyes are on him. They're still on him. And he couldn't articulate how much he doesn't want them to leave.


	10. Survival Tactics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They've been on the road for weeks, and scavenging by the road just isn't cutting it anymore. The leaders are all in accordance on what to do—save Daryl's reluctance to leave a certain blonde under the protection of others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who reads and reviews <3
> 
> Warnings for past abuse, and mild violence.

The sun has barely risen—is only now beginning to filter through the trees around the clearing they're camped in—but Daryl can tell from the air that it's going to be a dreary day. He yawns for the third time since he woke five minutes prior, jerking awake to Rick's touch on his shoulder before stretching and stumbling out of his blankets, pausing only to take a piss before joining Rick and Hershel by the fire.

Daryl shakes his head, trying to shock himself into wakefulness. At least he isn't the only one looking a little worse for wear—both men have heavy bags under their eyes, a feature Daryl is sure is mirrored on his own face; they wilt where they squat in a loose circle, squinting through the low light at the map spread between them.

“How much food did you say we have left?” Rick asks, scrubbing a hand over his face. His scruff is closer to a beard than stubble at this point, and makes a raspy sound as his hand runs across it.

“Not enough,” Hershel says. “Even if we cut rations again, it'll only last a few days at most.”

Rick sighs. “Guess we knew scavenging along the road was only going to last so long.” He jabs the map with a finger, glancing at Daryl. “You said we're about here, right?” Daryl nods, and Rick turns to Hershel. “You know anywhere nearby there might be houses?”

Hershel shakes his head. “It's mostly farmland around here. We might find a few farmsteads, but it's another day or two's walk to the next town.”

“Farms might be worth it,” Daryl says. Both men turn their attention on him, and Daryl only flushes a little. “Farther from the road, less likely they've been cleared out already.”

Hershel levels his gaze on Rick. “Lori's morning sickness is getting worse.” Rick scowls, looking away. Hershel persists. “It's a miracle she's able to travel at all. These places might have something, they might not, but we can't have everyone tramping through the woods to get to them.”

Daryl nods. “Big groups ain't good in the woods anyway. Too much noise, can't see what's coming.”

Rick sighs again. “We'll go out in small groups, then. Leave Carl, Beth, and Lori in camp, with a few people to guard them—“

“Why Beth?”

Hershel and Rick turn to Daryl again, and this time he does flush. Daryl shifts on his heels, avoiding their gazes. “Ain't like she's a cripple or nothing,” he mutters.

“She's sixteen,” Rick says, “and it's only been a few weeks since...” He trails off, glancing at Hershel's grim face. “You know. You really think she'd be ok on a run?”

“Maybe not yet,” Daryl says. He glances at Hershel; sees the old man's eyes steady on his face. As usual, it's hard for Daryl to read him. He doesn't look angry, at least, and that prompts Daryl to continue. “Listen, I know you don't want Carl out there and Lori ain't in no condition, but sixteen ain't twelve. She's a good shot, fast, smart, does what she's told.” Hershel's eyebrows quirk at that, and Daryl flushes, rushing on. “She's gonna have to learn to fight sooner or later, right? Ain't it better she do it now than when we're all freezing our asses off in a few weeks?”

Daryl looks between the other men and licks his suddenly dry lips. He doesn't think he's said that much at once to anyone but Beth since Merle died.

Rick's chewing on his lip, thinking hard. “He has a point, Hershel,” Rick says. “I'm sure Maggie can help her—“

“Maggie don't know shit,” Daryl says. It comes out harsher than he intended, but he grits his teeth, doesn't let their shock deter him. “The girl's strong, but she ain't no brawler. Don't know enough to teach someone she has five inches on.”

“If not Maggie—“

“I assume by you saying that, you think you _do_ know enough to teach her?” It's the first thing Hershel has said since Daryl raised the topic. “You would work with her?”

“Didn't know he was offering,” Rick says slowly. He looks apprehensive, like he expects Daryl to yell at him. “Would you, Daryl?”

Daryl shrugs, trying to play it cool. “Don't got nothing better to do.”

Rick studies him for a few moments before turning to Hershel. “It's your decision, Hershel,” he says.

Daryl ducks his head as Hershel regards him. He fully expects him to reject the idea. These mornings by the fire have been the only times Daryl's interacted with the old man for more than a minute at once, save when he got that arrow through his side; it's been going on for weeks but he still doesn't know what Hershel thinks of him. Beth told him he hadn't said anything to her about Daryl grabbing her arm—although Maggie'd had a few choice words, and still glares at him when she thinks he isn't looking—but Daryl has a feeling that much more goes on behind those blue eyes than the man expresses.

The pause goes on long enough that Daryl wonders whether he's just never going to answer, when Hershel says, “You really think she's capable?”

Daryl forces himself to meet Hershel's eyes this time—to meet that steady, intelligent gaze. Inject his tone with certainty.

“Yeah,” Daryl says. “Yeah, I do.”

Hershel nods slowly. “I think it's a good idea, then.” He looks at Rick. “You want to find somewhere defendable today, and go out tomorrow?”

Rick's still looking at Daryl like he's trying to figure out a puzzle; he nods without turning his head. “Yeah, yeah I think so.” He glances at the sky, blowing air out his nose. “Still early,” he says. “I don't know about you, but I'd kill for another hour of shut eye.”

Hershel chuckles. “Won't get any argument from me.” The three of them get to their feet, all with small groans of discomfort. “Get on the road in two hours, you think?”

“Sounds good.”

“I'll get started with Beth, then.”

Rick raises his eyebrows in surprise. “You want to start already?”

Daryl shrugs. “No reason not to. Might as well get it done without holding the group up.”

Rick glances at Hershel, who nods; Rick shrugs and turns back to Daryl. “Suit yourself. I for one am going back to sleep.”

“Seconded,” Hershel says. Rick starts off towards his blankets, and Daryl is turning to follow him when he feels a hand on his shoulder. “Hold on a minute, son.”

Daryl bites the inside of his cheek and turns. “What?” he asks gruffly.

Hershel regards him for a moment before turning his head, looking towards the sleeping group. Daryl follows his gaze. He knows what the man is looking for. Daryl finds the tuft of her golden hair easily.

“Bethy was a miracle, you know” Hershel says quietly. “The doctor warned us of the dangers, someone of Annette's age having another child. Suggested we abort, rather than go to term.” Hershel chuckles. “I took one look at Annette when the doctor left the room, and I knew. She wasn't going to give this baby up. It was a hard labor, but they made it through. I thank God every day, that they did.”

Daryl feels Hershel's eyes on him, but he can't drag his eyes away from Beth yet—imagines the rise and fall of her body that he would see, were he closer; the way her lips lie parted while she sleeps, the way her eyelashes flutter as she dreams. She's fallen asleep often enough when they sit together at night for him to know well what she looks like in slumber, and he feels that knowledge like a softness inside himself.

Daryl finally finds it in himself to turn and meet Hershel's gaze. He's surprised by the warmth in the man's eyes.

“I don't have to ask you to take care of her, do I?”

Daryl doesn't even hesitate before shaking his head.

“Nah. I'll take care of her.”

“Thank you,” Hershel says. His serious expression fades away, and he raises his eyebrows. “You let me know if she sasses you too much, you hear?”

Daryl surprises himself with a chuckle. “Yes'sir. Think I can take it, but I'll let you know.”

“I'm sure you can, son.” Hershel raises his arm like he wants to clap Daryl on the shoulder, but pauses and lowers it instead. “I'll leave you to it, then.”

Daryl nods, and then Hershel's walking away, heading for his own piece of shuteye. Daryl stands watching him for a few more moments before he unstraps his spare knife from his leg and starts towards Beth.

He can't help grinning at the yelp she gives as she shoots upright, gripping the knife in its holster that he'd tossed onto her stomach. She spends a few moments looking wildly around, taking in her surroundings; when she recognizes him, she relaxes, slumping a bit and rolling her eyes.

“Jerk.”

“Good morning to you too.”

“Is it even morning?”

“Technically, 's been morning since midnight.”

“Ha, ha,” Beth says. She picks up the knife in her lap and waves it at Daryl. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

Daryl jerks his head towards the deeper woods. “You're coming with me.”

Beth raises her eyebrows. “Am I?”

Daryl blows out air through his nose, pretending to be annoyed; he knows she sees the quirk of his mouth, though. No one else would, but she does.

“Don't be a smart ass,” he says. He reaches out a hand and helps pull her up. He's pleased to see she slept in her boots, like he told her to; it's faster if they have to run in the night. Not enough of them do it, but he doesn't feel comfortable telling the others to. She reaches for her pack but he shakes his head. “Leave your shit, won't need it.”

“Yes'sir, Mr. Dixon,” she says. Daryl rolls his eyes and starts towards the edge of the clearing; he can hear her giggling behind him. The sound makes his lips curve a little; an expression that falters when he glances to the side and sees Hershel watching them. Daryl nods at him, trying to hide the feeling he has of getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

But Hershel doesn’t seem perturbed; just nods calmly back, watching as they disappear into the trees.

* * *

Daryl feels the moment they truly leave the camp behind like they've crossed a tangible border; his shoulders relax and his nostrils flare, taking in the sharp clean scent of the woods.

He feels a prickle on his neck, and turns to see Beth watching him, a small smile on her face.

“What?” he asks gruffly.

She shrugs, still smiling. “You look different when we're out here.”

“Yeah? What do I look like?”

“Happy.”

He definitely didn't expect her to say that, and snorts softly, adjusting his bow on his shoulder. “You're still in dreamland, girl.”

“There's nothing wrong with being happy, Daryl.”

“Yeah, well. I ain't. So shush.”

He doesn't expect or want her to take him seriously. She giggles again, nudging him with her elbow.

“Ok, Mr. Scrooge, I'll be sure to remember that.” She's only silent for a few more steps. “Where are we going anyway?”

“Did I say you could ask questions?”

“Jeeze, you're in a mood.”

Daryl just smirks at that, glancing down at her. She still has a fuzzy just-woken look in her eyes; her eyelids hang low, and she blinks more often than normal. A light crust has built up in the inside corners of her eyes, and Daryl feels the absurd urge to stop her so he can wipe it away. Like so many other urges he has around her, he resists it; focuses instead on the sounds of the forest, the underbrush below.

He isn't surprised at all when Beth starts speaking again. She's a quiet thing 90% of the time; but get her alone and it's impossible to shut her up.

“I know you don't want me asking questions...”

“Spit it out, girl.”

“Where'd you learn to walk like that?”

Daryl frowns, looking at his feet. “Like what?”

“So quietly. I feel like a great big clodhopper next to you.”

Daryl shrugs, turning away so he can't see her looking at him. “Always walked like this,” he says.

“No one taught you?”

“Nah,” Daryl says.

But that isn't the truth. Not all of it. And when he glances over at Beth—sees her with her eyes on his feet, her own legs doing a little jig trying to imitate him, and making even more noise in the process—he realizes he doesn't much mind her knowing the truth.

“Had to learn it,” he says. Beth's eyes flick up to meet his and he looks away. “My dad took Merle and me on hunts soon as we could walk, pretty much.” Daryl snorts. “He was a dumb shit. Lucky it didn't kill both of us, stumbling around after him.”

“Why didn't he wait?” Beth asks. Daryl glances at her; sees her brows, lowered and straight, attentive; her gait back to normal, scuffed cowboy boots crunching dry leaves underfoot as she listens to him. Learns him, like she's always doing, like she seems to make it her job to do, sometimes. “If it was so dangerous...”

“He had two of us, didn't he?” Daryl says. “If one kicked it he'd still have the other.”

Beth is silent, and Daryl knows he's shocked her. Maybe he meant to. Maybe he wants her to know, suddenly, how different they are—how for all their similarities, her sister put her arm around her shoulders; her daddy asked Daryl to take care of her. Daryl wants her to know, as he leads her into the woods, what he sees in the early morning shadows.

“Made plenty of noise, at first. One of the first things I remember is getting whupped for stepping on a stick and scaring off a deer.”

It was Daryl's first broken bone, too—a fractured fibula, bruised ribs. If Merle hadn't been there to drag him home, Daryl'd probably have been gobbled up by a passing bear or wolf; a big enough eagle could probably've done off with him at that point. But Merle got him home; muttered under his breath as he patched him up, hid him from Mama until the black eye abated. A week later their dad had Daryl back out in the woods, and turned the fracture into a break.

“Learned fast, after that,” Daryl says.

“So... you taught yourself? No one told you how?”

Daryl shrugs. “Watched Merle, my dad. Didn't have a choice.”

“I wish I was smart like that.”

A twig snaps loudly as Daryl stops in his tracks; it takes Beth several paces to realize he's no longer with her. She stops and turns, looking at him quizzically.

“Daryl?”

“I ain't smart,” he says. He realizes his hands have clenched around his crossbow and he works to loosen them. He shakes his head once, twice. “I ain't,” he says.

Beth searches his face, and her eyes soften. She walks towards him, boots whispering on the forest floor. She stops a pace away, just close enough that she has to tilt her neck back to see him.

“Daryl,” she says, “you are.”

“I told you—“

“And I told _you_ –,” Beth says, taking half a step closer and poking his chest with her finger, “you are. Look at everything you can do. I couldn't dream of doing that stuff half as well as you do.”

“You haven't tried yet,” Daryl says.

“Yeah, but I'd have you to teach me, wouldn't I? You didn't even have that.” Beth curls her finger until her knuckles are pressed to his chest, then unfolds them so he can feel her palm burning through his shirt. She looks at her hand against him and licks her lips before looking back up, eyes twinkling as she feels his heartbeat accelerate. “Look at you,” she says softly; he almost has to lean forward to hear her. “You're like king of the woods or something. And you did it all on your own. That's _smart_.”

“You're crazy, girl,” Daryl says. But his voice is just as quiet. He feels like the atmosphere has shrunk down around the two of them; he couldn't step away if he wanted to. And no matter how wrong she is—he doesn't want to.

“Maybe,” she says, curling her fingers a little to scratch at his shirt. He shivers violently, and she freezes; tilts her head and runs her thumb back and forth across the fabric, bare centimeters from his nipple. He struggles to keep his breathing even. “But that doesn't make me wrong.”

Daryl thinks about stepping in. He thinks about moving, silently like she seems to admire so, swiftly so she doesn't have a chance to step back before her hand is trapped between their two chests. He doesn't know what he would do then—it's beyond his vocabulary, at this point, with her thumb still sweeping across his shirt, practically on his skin, the fabric is so light.

And he thinks that maybe he doesn't need to know. Thinks that maybe the only thing that matters is the two of them, alone in the woods, wrapped in atmosphere.

He takes a breath—

—and freezes, head jerking up and tilting, waiting, listening... and there, again.

A moan.

“Daryl?” Beth asks. Her hand is still on his chest, but it's stopped moving; and as he allows the woods to filter back into his awareness, for the world becomes more than them again.

In the end he's the one to step away from her, just far enough that he has room to settle his crossbow properly in his arms. He touches his ear, nodding at her meaningfully.

Beth frowns, but still cocks her own head, listening. It takes a moment, and then...

Her eyebrows shoot up, and she mouths, _Walker?_

Daryl nods, jerking his head in the direction they had been walking before he stopped. He presses a finger to his lips, raising his eyebrows; she nods immediately, and after a moment slides his knife from the sheath she's buckled to her hip.

As soon as she's ready, Daryl drops into a hunter's crouch and starts forward, moving like a whisper through the underbrush. Beth seems unbearably loud behind him, but he knows it's only because he's anticipating her footsteps; when he reaches the break in the trees and slows to a stop the walker doesn't notice them at all.

It's dressed like it was once an office worker. A cheap dress shirt hangs in tatters from its boney shoulders, fluttering around a mass of sagging flesh that must once have been a beer belly. Daryl can tell it's been dead for a long time, maybe even from the initial outbreak; the flesh has rotted almost completely off its jaw, and the bone glitters stark and shiny in the morning light. It's crouched over the remains of a rabbit, pulling chunks of meat up to its gaping maw.

Daryl feels Beth come up beside him; her arm brushes against his as she adjusts her hold on the knife. She is still looking at the walker but he can tell her attention is all on him.

Without taking his eyes from the walker, Daryl leans down until his lips brush her ear. She gives her own little shiver as his breath skitters across her skin; but he doesn't let himself think about that now.

“See that?” he asks, doing barely more than moving his lips. She hears him, though, and nods. “You're gonna kill it.”

Beth's face whips around, and Daryl can't help glancing down at her. He almost laughs at the look of shock on her face.

“Daryl—“ she whispers.

“You're gonna kill it,” he says again. He crouches lower so he's at her eye-level, and takes one hand from his bow to wrap around the one of hers that grasps the knife. “Get as close as you can before it notices you. Get one hand on the sternum to hold it back; stronger than the collarbone, less chance of snapping. Stay away from the teeth and stab it in the head.”

“Daryl, I don't...” Beth shakes her head. Daryl doesn't remember the last time he saw her eyes this wide. “Daryl, I can't do this. I don't know—”

“You ain't _tried_.” Daryl brings his hand up from her fist to grasp her face, hooking his thumb under her jaw and holding her in place. “You're _smart_ , Greene,” he growls. He jerks his bow. “I'll be covering you. If things go bad I'll end it. You trust me to do that, right?” She nods without hesitation, firmly enough that it makes something in Daryl's chest pound—but she still looks scared.

Holding her gaze, Daryl brings his face closer to hers, moving in until their foreheads brush. He looks between her eyes, waiting for her to blink. She does, slowly; he's close enough he imagines he can feel the breeze from her eyelashes. “Beth,” he says, holding her face tight. “You can do this.”

As Daryl watches her, he sees the fear begin to fade away from her eyes, replaced slowly by a steely calmness. She nods, and he nods, and he releases her.

Daryl waits for her to look away first, fingers flexing around the knife, before he hefts the crossbow and begins moving sideways just outside the edge of the clearing, walker clear in his sight. Once he has what he expects to be a good angle, he looks back towards Beth; her eyes flicker away from the walker to meet his. She takes a deep breath, and nods strongly. His lips twitch, and she steps into the clearing.

She isn't as silent as she could be, but she's close; she's barely six feet from the walker before it notices her, head snapping up, intestines still dangling from its jaw. It sets its sightless eyes on Beth before lurching to its feet, letting out a gurgling snarl, and stumbling forward.

Daryl sees the moment panic reenters Beth's limbs; his hands spasm on the crossbow as she takes one step back, then two, hand in a white knuckle choke on her knife. Daryl half expected her first time to go like this; maybe if he hadn't surprised her—

He's about to pull the trigger when he sees her hand loosen, her shoulders relax. Her eyes, panic stricken a moment before, narrow in concentration as she cocks her head, dropping deeper into her crouch. The walker groans and she digs her heel into the ground and lunges.

The walker snarls as her hand slaps against its sternum, jerking its head forward violently. Its neck is so decayed Daryl almost expects the entire thing to snap off; but it holds, and it reaches easily forward to snag its claws into the shoulders of Beth's jacket. Her arm shakes and Daryl's finger twitches and she raises the knife—

—and misjudges her thrust, hitting the boney part of the brow and giving a small cry as her knife skids off the walker's skull.

Daryl rises from his crouch and is about to pull the trigger when her voice stops him.

“Wait!” Beth says between gritted teeth, and, body thrumming, Daryl does. She lets her knee release and staggers back a few steps, and Daryl's biceps clench, sure she'll fall—

—but she doesn't; she braces her heel again, faces the stumbling walker, and shoves her knife directly into its left eye.

Daryl feels the tension leave him in a rush as Beth leaps backwards, letting the walker crumble to the ground in front of her. For a moment, the two are still—Beth's shoulders heave as she stares at the corpse at her feet. Her mouth is open as she pants, and great wisps of hair have escaped her ponytail to dangle around her face.

She sniffs in loudly, then looks at Daryl. Her hand is shaking a little around the knife, and a great glob of gore slides off it, landing in a puddle at her feet.

“You're an asshole, Daryl Dixon.”

And Daryl grins—honest to god grins, teeth bared and lips stretched as he steps over the fallen branch in front of him.

“Yeah, and you just got your first walker.”

“You're still an asshole,” she says; but she's grinning too now, and he thinks it looks so much better on her. “Is this why you brought me out here? To kill walkers?”

“You gotta learn sometime,” Daryl says. He reaches her side, and looks down with her on her prize. He jerks his chin at it. “Go on, see if it's got anything.”

Beth glances at him, then sheaths her knife and drops into a crouch, patting quickly at its back pockets before flipping it over with a soft grunt to do the same to the front. Daryl keeps one eye on the woods around them and the other on the girl, snorting softly as she wrinkles her nose when her hand hits something definitely not in a pocket.

“Shut up, Dixon,” she says. “I'm not _that_ desperate, thank you very much.”

“Dunno, girl; don't look like too sad a package—“

“Daryl. Stop.” Picking at the fabric daintily, she reaches into the walker's front pocket. She grasps something, and snorts. “Of course.” She pulls out her find, revealing a box of Marlboros. She tosses it to Daryl who catches it easily. He peeks inside it, and smirks when he finds it mostly full. “Least you got something out of that besides amusement.”

“What're you talking about, girl?” he asks, fishing his Zippo out of his pocket and lighting up, sighing gratefully as the smoke fills his lungs. “Little killing, a little dick; 's a good day for you.”

“You're gross,” Beth says, straightening from her crouch. “Too bad the cigarettes are all he had,” she says, looking down. Daryl turns his head so the smoke doesn't blow in her face. When he turns back she's glancing at him. “Where do you think he came from? He isn't dressed for camping.”

“What do you think?”

Beth frowns, looking down. “The highway from Atlanta ain't too far off; a car, maybe? Trying to get out of the city?”

Daryl's lips twitch around his cigarette, but he straightens his expression before she sees it. “Ain't a bad guess,” he says. He hefts his crossbow, jerking his head towards the deeper woods. “C'mon; you're gonna get three more before we go back.”

“Three?” Beth asks. She sounds more like a teenager than Daryl has ever heard her. He turns back, smirking.

“Keep up or I ain't coming back for you.”

“You are incredibly rude, anyone ever tell you that?” Daryl thinks that at least a little of her huffiness is real; but she's still following him, leaping nimbly over the walker and jogging to catch up. “I'm keeping this knife, by the way.”

“Fine. 'S a girly knife anyway.”

“Will it still be girly when it's buried in your guts, Dixon?”

Daryl snorts. “Please. Couldn't even reach the muscle with that thing.”

Beth rolls her eyes, but doesn't respond; just falls into step, walking beside him in the underbrush.

She doesn't say much as they walk; asks him about a berry bush they pass, a sudden jabber of birdsong. It takes Daryl a few minutes to realize that he feels something strange. Like a softness, like a light; like he did his first day out in the woods, before his father taught him what he was supposed to feel out there.

_Yeah? What do I look like?_

Her steps are still loud to his ears; but as she follows him into the wild, he could swear they're getting softer.

 


	11. More Than Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beth is gearing up for her first big run. She and Daryl share some quiet moments the night before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I LIIIIIIVE
> 
> Yes, amazingly, this story is still going. Hope you enjoy :)

> _We are homeward bound_   
>  _And I,_   
>  _I want this more than life - Whitley_

Living in the country his whole life, Daryl wouldn't call himself a stranger to the stars. How many nights did him and Merle spend spread out in the beds of pickups or by the side of dying fires, downing beer after beer as they watched the night sky? Those were some of the few times Daryl liked Merle drunk; out there in the wilderness, nothing to see them but the birds and the bucks they hunted, Merle would tell stories. Some he learned from their old man, but most from books: stories about how Orion got his belt, or the lovers who were not fated to be together on Earth, and so were connected by a river of light in the heavens. His voice would go all hushed, like he was worried someone would overhear; but no one ever did. Not unless he counted Daryl himself. And sometimes Daryl wonders if he did count in those Merle didn't want privy to his whispers; whether his brother lost himself in the night sky, leaving his body and his charge far away down on Earth.

The stars are out in full force tonight. They have been brighter since the world ended—not as much light coming from down below, Daryl suspects—but something about them seems brighter than usual; iridescent in the way they glimmer, sparking in and out like they're talking to each other in Morse code.

Maybe there is something special about tonight; or maybe he's just spent too long staring at the ground.

He hears her before he sees her, of course; but not as long before as he once would have. She's getting better.

He struggles to control his smile at the sound of those steps—so familiar now he bets he could pick them out in the middle of a stampede—and nearly succeeds; by the time she emerges from the trees he's gotten it down to a small lift at the corner of his mouth.

When he actually catches sight of her, though, his efforts all fail. If the stars glow bright tonight, she burns with a fire wild enough to extinguish them all. When her eyes fall on him, when a smile spreads across her own face, he feels those flames begin to consume.

“Did you hear me that time?” she asks in the hushed way he taught her, voice pitched low, in the rumble of her chest. She doesn't wait for him to answer before walking over and plopping down at his side. He had been looking at her face and didn't notice the blanket she carried; she spreads it across them before burrowing into his side, behind his arm so he can disentangle himself quickly.

“Only for a few miles,” he says. He can almost hear the way she scrunches his nose at him. “Keep working on it, you might get it someday.”

“Liar,” Beth says, jabbing him in the side with her finger. “I'm getting good and you know it. You're just scared I'm catching up to you.”

Daryl snorts. “Not a chance, girl.”

“I'll show you,” Beth says primly.

He has no doubt.

They sit in silence for a while after that, Beth tracing patterns on Daryl's arm beneath the blanket, Daryl shivering softly beneath her light touch. He doesn't look up at the stars anymore, but he still catches them in his periphery: brightness above, darkness ahead, light blonde strands blowing into his face from the side. One of them gets in his mouth, but he doesn't complain; just rolls the unfamiliar feeling around his gums, breathes in the feeling of her beside him.

“You shouldn't stay much longer,” he says after he estimates the moon has moved an hour's worth across the sky. “If you're gonna be ready for the run tomorrow. Need your rest.”

He feels her loose body begin to tense up when he begins speaking; by the time he's finished, most of her relaxation is gone. She pulls her legs in tighter towards herself, so her knees tip over into his lap. She breathes in deeply and he imagines she's smelling him.

“You really think I'm ready?” she asks, softly enough that if he were not so attuned to her voice, he might have missed it.

“No, I'm risking all our lives for the fun of it,” he says. He twists his neck so he can look down at her, catching a cheek and the edge of one eye. “Course I think so, Greene. What, any reason why I shouldn't?”

Beth shrugs, turning her head so all he can see of her is her ear and the curve of a cheekbone. A thick strand of hair blows between them and he nudges it out of the way, his chin dragging on her exposed neck in the process. She shivers beneath the chill wind and he puts his arm around her to tug her closer, until she's practically in his lap.

She still seems distracted, so he shakes her softly, keeping his voice light. “I said, any reason why I shouldn't?”

She turns to look at him now. Her eyes are so dark so as to be almost black in the oppressive night. He's close enough that he can see the moon reflecting off of each eyelash.

“We've only been working on this a couple of weeks,” she says. “You really think I can keep up with you and Maggie?”

“Ain't like we've been fighting walkers since birth, neither,” Daryl says. His voice is so hushed he can feel it vibrating from his ribcage to hers. “I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to help you. You ever seen Maggie go up against three walkers at a time, take 'em down like you did?”

Beth shrugs, pressing her forehead to his shoulder like she doesn't want him to see her eyes.

Daryl brushes the hair away from her face, presses his lips against the hairline. Beth shivers beside him and Daryl feels his body growing too hot under the shared blanket. But he doesn't move his mouth; speaks with his lips brushing her skin.

“You're gonna be fine, Beth,” he says. “And I'll be with you. Ain't nothing can stand up to that.”

Beth presses her mouth against Daryl's arm. Even through the layers, he feels her smile.

“You know,” Beth says, raising her chin so she can rest it on Daryl's shoulder, “My mama would have done great in the apocalypse.”

Daryl raises his eyebrows, working on keeping his eyes on her eyes and not on her lips.

“Mmhm,” Beth says. “She wasn't Maggie's biological mother, but they had a lot in common. Same habit of getting into trouble. Same temper, too.”

Daryl winces a little. “Wouldn't wanna be on the receiving end of both of them.”

Beth lets out a soft laugh, air streaming from her nose to tickle Daryl's neck. “No, you really didn't.” She goes quiet for a moment, turning her head so she can rest her temple on Daryl's shoulder again. “She was a ballet dancer before she met Shawn's daddy,” Beth says, so softly that even with their proximity Daryl has to strain to hear her. “And she was a good one. Had an invite to Lincoln Center and everything.”

“She didn't go?”

Beth shakes her head. “She wanted to be married, have kids. Said she'd wanted that even longer than she wanted to be a dancer.” Beth pushes herself even closer, like she's trying to crawl inside his skin. “What did your mom wanna be?”

Daryl opens his mouth with the easy retort— _nothing, absolutely nothing, and that's why she got what she got_ —but he pauses. Because he knows that's not true.

“She liked to write,” he says. “Was the first thing she started hoarding, before all the rest, notebooks and pens and shit. When she was working she even saved up for a typewriter.” He swallows, blinks. He glances at Beth. “You know, the thing before computers.”

Beth elbows him, making him grunt. “I know what a typewriter is, dummy.”

“Seein's you didn't know what fucking carbon paper was—“

“You're just mad cause you're _old_.”

Daryl presses his grin into Beth's hair. He uses it as an excuse to breathe her in. “Ya got me there.”

Beth giggles, snuggling into him again. “You ain't old,” Beth says. “Just crotchety.”

“My crotch ain't none of your business.”

Beth looks at him, eyebrows raised, and for the first time in the conversation Daryl finds he has to look away. He takes a moment to scan the trees like he's doing his job, not getting cozy with a fucking sixteen year old.

Cause the thing is, it is her business. It is her business very much.

She doesn't respond, though; just turns her head to follow his eye-line, peer through the darkness. An owl hoots somewhere far off, its cry echoing through the trees. Daryl sniffs the air and it is a mixture of forest and campfire and her and he doesn't think he's ever smelled anything sweeter.

Beth speaks so suddenly, and so much louder than she had been, that Daryl jumps.

“Want me to show you?”

Daryl frowns. “Show me what?”

“What my mama did.”

Beth waits a moment for his reply; when it doesn't come, she disentangles herself from his body and throws back the blanket, leaving Daryl's side shocked with cold. He blinks up at Beth as she leaps to her feet.

“The fuck you doing? It's fucking freezing, come on.”

“I wanna show you,” Beth says, eyes dropping wide, lower lip jutting out. Daryl's incredulity falls into a glare.

“Don't even try it, Greene,” he growls.

“I'm not trying anything,” she protests.

“You are, your fuckin'...” Daryl trails off, then shakes his head, muttering to himself. When he looks up, she's smirking in a way that makes his stomach flip. “What do you wanna show me?”

A little of the deviousness leaves her smile, until she just looks happy. “I was always too uncoordinated to dance; always tripping all over my own feet. But Mama taught me a little.” Beth's smile falters, and she looks suddenly unsure. “And, I dunno. Thought you might want to see.”

Daryl shrugs, fighting for nonchalance even as his heart begins to pound. “Ain't got nothing better to do.”

He's worried for a moment that he's offended her; but through the shadows he sees her smile grow again, each white tooth like a punch to his chest.

It's nothing to what he feels when she begins to dance.

He sees immediately what she means about being clumsy. It ain't like he knows much about dancing—he remembers his ma taking him to the local playhouse a few times when he was little, before things got really bad, where high schoolers put on shitty little shows for kids who couldn't pay for the real thing—but he knows a thing or two about bodies, how they move when they're meant for something. And Beth ain't meant for this, that's for certain: Her limbs look long and ungainly as she bends her knees outward, sweeps her arms up; she has to adjust her stance before leaping into a spin that ends in a stumble.

But she giggles, and keeps going. And Daryl can't look away.

He's thrown back to the stories his ma would slur at him somewhere around her third or fourth drink; stories she'd heard from her grandma before she moved away to Georgia to become Mrs. Dixon. Stories about girls who roamed the woods for so long the grass and the trees became part of their bones, the wind that shook the boughs inseparable from the breath they breathed. Little laughing girls who wandered into the forest and never came out; girls who turned into women who led men into starvation and danced for the moon.

The stars Daryl had watched before seem dragged from the sky into the whirl of her ponytail as she spins again, arcs her arm and bends at the waist before leaping again. Her feet make small sounds against the forest floor, her mouth gives the occasional grunt of exertion; but otherwise she leaves no mark on the world as she twirls and swoops. Her hair is falling in strands from her ponytail and sticks to her lips but does nothing to hide the way her eyes cling to him, making sure he's watching, hasn't drifted away. And he wants to laugh at her, the silly thing, for how could he? How could he.

Daryl would sit here for days on end; planted in the underbrush, life gone, friends forgotten, just to watch his girl dance.

He only realizes he's shaking when she drops back down beside him, her own body thrumming and smelling slightly of sweat. She sits there silently for a moment before sighing and twining her hand with his, laying the tangle in her lap.

“Told ya I wasn't all that good.”

Daryl finds he can't answer her, can't even look to see if she knows what she's done to him.

Not until he feels his knuckles press against the solid plane of her stomach; not until she presses him into her like she did all those nights ago, wrapped in sheets, wrapped in despair, wrapped in him in her childhood bed as the world around them burned.

He turns to her and he sees her and she knows. He knows she knows, because she looks back at him and she doesn't smile. She doesn't speak, doesn't whisper.

She lays her lips against his collar. The briefest touch, barely a flutter, but he feels her there; her sticky wet half on his skin, half off.

Like half of him is cold, half not. That half is warm. Wrapped in the blanket. Wrapped in her.

Her and the stars. Her and the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please remember to review :)


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